<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Storm of Iron by TheLightdancer</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24705874">Storm of Iron</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer'>TheLightdancer</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Phoenix Multiverse [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Warhammer 40.000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 10:22:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>50,950</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24705874</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In an alternate 41st Millennium, the Last Primarch, Perturabo, finds himself drawing together with his brothers in the last battle and day of doom for all of humanity and ultimately the Galaxy itself. As the loyal Primarchs return, so do other forgotten entities. It is a time of ending, of mighty heroes and of bold courage, and as the Galaxy burns, the dour Perturabo begins to realize that worshiping his father and himself as gods might have become a greater danger than any could have imagined possible. Cross-posted from my FF.net account and edited for whats basically the Mk. II version.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>No Romantic Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Phoenix Multiverse [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1430596</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. For Want of a Nail</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="content">
<p></p><div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
<p></p><div class="page">
<p></p><div>
<p></p><div><p>
            <em>Bridge of the Vengeful Spirit: </em>
          </p><p>Horus Lupercal, Warmaster and victorious commander of the Legions of Chaos, stared at his father, the mighty Emperor and Master of Mankind. Looking with contempt at his father over the corpse of his brother, the blessed Sanguinius, he kicked the corpse forward, callously leaning forward and smiling.</p><p>"Is my dear brother Perturabo here? I do hope his mediocrity didn't harm you in the Siege of your Palace, my callous betraying gene-sire."</p><p>The Emperor looked at Horus quietly, his Sword beginning to glow with the sheer essence of his own Psyker abilities.</p><p>"You are a fool, supposed Master of Mankind. Against you the Lords Four have raised a great banner. They would grant Mankind all that it wills, they would make us still greater than ever we imagined ourselves to be! You are a timid weakling who cowers before the great Gods, but if you in your timidity knelt before me, I will spare your life. I might even keep you as a jester to my own court as the Emperor Lupercal, Master of Mankind by the will of the Gods!"</p><p>The Emperor looked at Horus.</p><p>"No mortal is the master of Chaos. It uses you, you do not use it."</p><p>Snarling, Horus prepared crackling energy only to see Perturabo marching toward him. With a sudden and swift movement he hurled the blast at his brother only to his surprise to see the Iron Warriors Primarch easily dodge the electricity, raising a bolter whose presence caused both Horus and the Emperor to register shock and a strange reaction.</p><p>As he noticed this, Horus also saw his own abilities seemingly weakening.</p><p>"Horus the arch-traitor, you shall atone for all your crimes against the Imperium! Against our father! Against our brothers, slain on the battlefield of Isstvan V!"</p><p>Horus growled with a rumbling bestial tone.</p><p>"If Rogal Dorn hadn't joined me, you would not have been overly concerned about this. You might have even joined me, your precious world a bonfire."</p><p>Perturabo smiled, a grim, cruel, and more than somewhat sinister smile.</p><p>"It is more than true that the mere presence of Dorn and his sons as traitors made my loyalty an assurance. But I know now, my dear brother, why my Legion was so over-stretched. I know which skulking coward attempted to break us, to make me burn my world. I know which maniacal egotist engaged in such a crime against not only nature and the rationality that Imperial Truth might have brought, but let a galaxy burn because his precious ego was offended.</p><p>I never did trust my father's wisdom in making your Warmaster, and this foul civil war you have unleashed only validates that distrust. In the memory of my brother Ferrus, a martyr to your war, and to the blessed Sanguinius, my bolter shall humble even the strutting monster who adores the so-called Gods in the Warp! I have had explained to me by the Sigilite the nature of what you serve.</p><p>These are no Gods, these are the manifestations of all the evil and filth in the universe, an evil and filth you slake as long as you draw breath. Even now other Primarchs rally to our cause."</p><p>Growling, Horus strode closer to Perturabo, who saw the chink in his brother's armor and suddenly formed a very grim smile indeed, one that brought Horus to a halt.</p><p>"Tell me, willing servant of the Warp, what happens to those addicted to Chaos if you are struck by bullets hallowed with the power of Blanks?"</p><p>Horus's eyes suddenly widened and he took a step back.</p><p>"Yes, brother, weapons hallowed by the blood of a Sister of Silence your treacherous betrayers slew."</p><p>With that he fired his bolter four times, the strikes ones Horus attempted to disrupt with the electricity he'd stored up but the rounds passed harmlessly through the electricity and slammed into the chink in his armor. Four perfect shots, the kind only a Primarch could make. The weapons hallowed by the power of the Blank struck Horus with a resounding set of wet thuds that led the Arch-Traitor to roar in pain.</p><p>As he staggered back, Perturabo took from his back the massive Thunder Hammer that he'd made infamous in his vendetta against the traitor Dorn and the legions of Horus in that order. The mighty <em>Worldbreaker, </em>product of Olympias, hallowed by the power of the Lectio Divinitatus. It was a gilded Warhammer, glowing still further with a crackling orange energy that took blasts of electricity from Horus and dissipated them harmlessly.</p><p>As he strode forward and raised his hammer toward Horus, his downward swing was blocked by none other than his father. The reason why was apparent, as Horus had sunk to his knees, blood not stopping, his face no longer glowing with the fell red light of the Warp. Instead he was crying, looking at his father and Perturabo.</p><p>"I see it now." The rumbling power was gone. The voice was a quivering whisper of a wreck, of a shell where there had been power.</p><p>"You were right. They lied to me, they deceived me, they made me betray everything that I was. Father, I wish to die as myself. Don't let Perturabo kill me for vengeance, when the red haze of anger fades it will never sit well on his conscience." The Emperor looked at his son in a mask of despair.</p><p>"You are right, my son. Forgive me for failing you, as I failed all humanity. I wished that people could triumph over the most bestial elements of the Immaterium with their own highest instincts. Man was not as much as I believed him to be, nor the supermen I made in my image." Sighing, the Emperor then turned to Horus and a sudden and powerful blast of Soulfire flared, Horus dying with a smile as his soul was utterly eradicated and spared the attentions of the Chaos Gods.</p><p>There, on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit, stood the Emperor and then the legions of Chaos began to prepare to flee. As the Emperor teleported his sons and servants away, he returned to his palace and to the Golden Throne, architect of his misfortunes. Looking at it he saw a glimpse of a future that could have been, his body a rotting corpse maintained by the sacrifice of thousands every day. Immobilized, the only sane man in an insane universe stuck in perpetuity.</p><p>Sighing, he then sank to his knees for hours as his sons arrived. Guilliman, Johnson, Khan, and Perturabo. An alliance of demigods, consoling the broken God whose tears wept for the future he had envisioned, and in recognition of the future that would be. After a couple of hours, the Emperor rose and turned to his sons.</p><p>"I expected that I would die in the battle with my son the Warmaster. That in death I would serve the Imperium for ten millennia until this device failed and I sank to death, a species failed."</p><p>He pointed to the place where the psychic residue of Malcador remained.</p><p>"Before he died, I told Malcador to prepare for the future. One unbreakable shield against the coming darkness. One last blade forged in defiance of fate. A legacy to the Galaxy I conquered, and one last gift to the species I failed. Then I expected to die, and now because of the strangeness of fate," and he here he looked to Perturabo with a strange gaze that mixed sorrow and wonder, "I live."</p><p>He stood up and told them, "My sons, the Imperial Truth has failed spectacularly. Much as it pains me, I must endorse the very words of Lorgar, and make them a truth to unify humanity. No longer their Emperor," he sighed deeply, "now a God-Emperor in Holy Terra, assailing my foes as needs be. This Heresy has broken my initial weapons."</p><p>He rubbed his face with his armored gauntlet, another deep sigh issuing from seemingly within his soul. For a moment the ageless giant seemed very old indeed and weighed down with the pressures and weight of all those years. The moment passed.</p><p>"The battle on the <em>Vengeful Spirit</em> will lead the traitors to flee into the Eye of Terror. Though it may defy conventional strategy, I shall let my traitorous sons and Astartes flee. We have lost so much on Terra that must be rebuilt first." The Emperor sighed.</p><p>"Malcador sealed the Warp-Rift in Terra, and paid for that with the ruin of his life and body. And of his soul." He looked to his sons.</p><p>"Today is the first day of a new era. The age of enlightenment and empirical truth has ended, my sons. Now we face the age of darkness, where there is nothing among the stars but slaughter and the thirst of laughing gods. My first aim to destroy Chaos has failed. It may be that this second one will also fail over the course of the Long War."</p><p>His sons, now with the rest of his Primarchs, his loyal ones, who still lived and who'd arrived and straggled in, appalled at the detritus of the battle before and around them gathered around him as he raised his sword and they all raised their weapons.</p><p>"We may not be able to defy fate," the God-Emperor vowed, "but we shall give the Ruinous Powers such a death of the human race that they shall tremble in their Hells. And perhaps, if the first approach failed, that second shall succeed. To the glory of the human race!"</p><p>The Primarchs as one shouted, "To the glory of the human race!"</p><p>With that they vanished from the bridge of the <em>Vengeful Spirit,</em> taking the body of Sanguinius with them. Only then did the servants of the XVI Legion cautiously steal into the great ship and take it, last of the Traitor Fleet, into the eye of the Hell they had earned for themselves.</p></div></div></div></div></div>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Perturabo Goes to Pythos</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The Despoiler comes to Pandorax believing his triumph is easily guaranteed. Then he gets exactly what he thinks he wanted.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="content">
  <p></p>
  <div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
    <p></p>
    <div class="page">
      <p></p>
      <div>
        <p></p>
        <div>
          <p>
            <em>It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the God-Emperor of Mankind has ruled the embattled Imperium from the Imperial Palace on Terra. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the Gods, the conqueror of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. His armies are led by his Warmaster, Grim Perturabo of the Iron Warriors, the sole Primarch left alive and functional, masters of a new Dark Age of Technology.</em>
          </p>
          <p>
            <em>He is the Golden Lord of Terra, in whose name billions die every day with a song on their lips. In his secretiveness the Emperor prepares new plans to repair the ravages of the Horus Heresy, manipulating the timeless aspects of the Warp to his aims. By his will the great Astronomican that guides humanity through the stars burns, and when the Emperor and his Warmaster direct their armies personally, the armies are unstoppable.</em>
          </p>
          <p>
            <em>Greatest of all his soldiers is Warmaster Perturabo, whose Iron Warriors are the greatest among the Adeptes Astartes, rivaled only by the mighty Warlock-Warriors of the Grey Knights. Among their allies are the ever-vigilant Inquisition, the fanatical Adeptes Sororitas, and the Imperial Guard to name only a few. But all their strength is barely sufficient to hold against the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and of mutants corrupted by the foul powers of the dark gods.</em>
          </p>
          <p>
            <em>To live in this time is to live in the time of ending, in the most cruel and barbarous terror imaginable, yet it is a time of mighty heroes, of bold deeds, and great courage. And as the Wolf-time draws ever nearer, the Imperium shall need its heroes as it has never needed them before. Science, reason, and technology, the greatest achievements of the human race, these have been forgotten in the Long War. Forget compassion and understanding, for there is only war in the grim dark future, but an eternity of slaughter and death and the thirst of laughing Gods.</em>
          </p>
          <p>XXXXXXXX</p>
          <p>The Warmaster's flagship <em>Olympia Maximus:</em></p>
          <p>Warmaster Perturabo, last of the Primarchs, returned to his ship and his Trident, his mightiest Warmsiths and masters of the Iron Warriors. He'd just finished visiting Guilliman, always a moment that was deeply moving and sorrowful to him. Of all his brothers, only Guilliman and Johnson were left with bodies intact and fate known. He knew nothing certain of the fate of his closer friends like Jaghatai Khan or Leman Russ, and he mourned what he believed was their certain death. He alone, the Primarch assigned in the old days before the Heresy and for some time after to the least rewarding and favorable jobs, was left now.</p>
          <p>The Iron Warriors had eschewed the greater style of most of their fellow Legions, becoming experts in maintaining and reviving ancient technology to rival the Adeptus Mechanicus. In all the Long War, Perturabo had suffered only one defeat that burned into his memory in perpetuity, the horrors of the Iron Cage. His mocking counterpart across the realm of Chaos, Rogal Dorn, had baited him into a perfect assault he could not resist. 200 of his best sons had been lost there.</p>
          <p>Perturabo, alone among the Primarchs, had been supremely ruthless even before the Heresy, and he had only been moreso afterward. It was understanding of this tendency to what lesser things like mankind might deem paranoia that had led his father and Guilliman to place him in command of both the Inquisitions and to serve as the guidance and joint commander of the new Grey Knights Legion as well. Where Perturabo marched, so fell the foes of the Imperium by tens of thousands, by hundreds of thousands, by millions. Where Perturabo and his father marched, even the Greater Daemons and the accursed Daemon Primarchs fell before them.</p>
          <p>The Soulfire that could cleanse others had claimed in an apocalyptic battle in the First War for Armageddon his failed brother Angron. Angron the mad brute, madder still, beaten by Worldbreaker and the sheer power of his father.</p>
          <p>His father spent much of his time in the labs from whence he and his brothers had come, working on what Perturabo knew would be a second generation of Primarchs. He didn't see anything to object to given how many of his brothers had fallen. The memory of his brutal confrontations with his Daemon-Prince Arch-Foe in the so-called Black Crusades of Abaddon the Despoiler burned each time.</p>
          <p>Refusal to continue to stalemate had led to his approaching his father with the view to weaponize blanks as he'd done all those years ago. It had taken several thousand years, but his plans bore fruition. New Great Crusades aimed at the Eye of Terror had begun to rip and tear into it, causing it to slowly shrink and wither.</p>
          <p>Perturabo looked over at the world of Pythos. Here some very unusual things had occurred. Abaddon the Despoiler had personally taken command of an invasion on the world, an invasion that in spite of the…..other Warmaster…..having personal command was able to be effectively challenged by mere humans of the Imperial Guard and a single Founding Brother of the Grey Knights.</p>
          <p>Aware of the interest of the Dark Angels in this campaign and their secretiveness, and the potential for Azrael and Draigo to miss the real goal of Abaddon in pursuit of the war, Perturabo had invoked his power as the Warmaster and brought a massive force of Grey Knights and Iron Warriors, including his Trident.</p>
          <p>Kroeger, the Hammer of Justice who broke the Warp on his blunt and brutal approach that struck only toward his foes with overpowering force. Vull Bronn, his Stonewrought, the mightiest master of fortification short of Perturabo himself, and Falk, the Warsmith's Warsmith. Each of them were landing with drop pods, keeping close eyes on the presences of Azrael and Draigo.</p>
          <p>Perturabo himself had access to one of his father's new weapons available only to the Primarchs. By the ill fate that led to Lion'El and Roboute being entrapped in their stasis fields in dreaming death, these had fallen to the safeguarding of Perturabo. Aware that his brothers were sleeping, however, he entrusted to them to safeguard the will of the sleeping Primarchs, to enable them to direct their legions.</p>
          <p>These were the Star-Choir, Psykers of tremendous power who specialized as a kind of highly secretive and strongly shielded against the Warp set of messengers. They had confirmed to him the presence of a most interesting Grey Knight, a Psyker of awe-inspiring force whose presence gave him a hint as to why Abaddon would risk an overt confrontation.</p>
          <p>Aware of this, the Primarch then made his decision. He, with his Iron Circle, would land not near the Psyker but near Abaddon. The Despoiler might wish the Psyker, but there would be no means for him to refuse the challenge of a Primarch, the Last of the Loyalists. Perturabo grinned.</p>
          <p>Before, he had only fought his fellow Daemon-Primarchs or entire armies, and with the exception of Dorn his abilities to weaponized hallowed power and marry that to his mastery of fortification made him victor over countless worlds. Now he would finally be able to punish the impudent whelp who'd taken the place of the Arch-Traitor. Activating his teleportation technology, Perturabo and his Trident and Iron Circle all vanished in a blinking of glowing light.</p>
          <p>XXXXXXXXXX</p>
          <p>For the 183d Imperial Guard regiment, the sight that was about to greet them was little short of awe-inspiring. For the Forces of Chaos it was this and a sight that made even the most fanatical of cultists suddenly turn a bit more jaded. The crackling light of teleportation had appeared and as Azrael grinned at those who'd challenged him, his expression turned to one of shock. Before them all stood Warmaster Perturabo, successor to Guilliman and Horus as much as Abaddon himself.</p>
          <p>Even by the standards of the Space Marines around him, Perturabo was an intimidating and terrifying sight. His armor retained the shape of the days of the Heresy. It was, however, enhanced as reflected the greater power and brute force of a Primarch. Even Abaddon seemed taken aback by the appearance of the massive Primarch, and his Chaos Marines were stunned as well. Then the greediness of the desire to say that they'd defeated the last of the Imperium's Demigods took over and Perturabo, feeling the enhanced power of the reverential awe of the masses of Loyalists around him brought out Worldbreaker.</p>
          <p>"A good day to die, Daemons!"</p>
          <p>And with that the grand Battle of Pythos began, and the first of the great schemes of Perturabo as a prelude to the next Great Crusade into the Eye of Terror…..</p>
          <p></p>
          <div class="content">
            <p></p>
            <div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
              <p></p>
              <div class="page">
                <p></p>
                <div>
                  <p></p>
                  <div>
                    <p>
                      <em>The Battlefield of Attika, Pythos: </em>
                    </p>
                    <p>"Tell me, Horus-manx, is it a trinket this time? A soul? For what purposes have the vomit of the fell inclinations of mankind and the xenos called you forth now?"</p>
                    <p>Abaddon's eyes widened and then he snarled.</p>
                    <p>As Corpulax lumbered forth, Perturabo sighed and then as Worldbreaker glowed with the same eerie energy it had first displayed all those centuries ago he swung it with a blinding speed that tore clean through the body of Corpulax, igniting the ashes. Smiling with a sinister and terrible grin, Perturabo said to Abaddon, "I have not come here to bandy words with your simpering magggots, Arch-Traitor. You shall face me, or I shall brand you here and now before all your followers as no False Warmaster, but as a coward worthy only of the least condemnation."</p>
                    <p>Abaddon snarled. The Primarch had spoiled everything again. Perturabo's Great Crusades were eating into the Eye of Terror. The Anathema was still pursuing the thrice-accursed Webway schemes by new approaches largely veiled to the eyes of the Ruinous Powers. Two of his Black Crusades had been directly spoiled by the very appearance of Perturabo and his Trident, and then the God-Emperor and his Custodes.</p>
                    <p>This had cost him the most grievous loss in his Long War, the monstrous Fabius Bile whose aid had been essential in keeping the recruits of the Chaos Legions going. The memory of the Master of Mankind, in full power as a God, stabbing Bile through the chest with his glowing sword and the beam of Soulfire that had condemned Bile to ashes with the last words that Bile had heard from the Master of Mankind a growled, "Your blasphemy is atoned for," still sent chills down him.</p>
                    <p>But the Primarch was correct. He could not allow the challenge to go unheard, not after his last two failures. He'd barely squeaked by with his superweapons even as his prestige was heavily damaged in each case, but attaining those goals had kept his Masters from turning on him in full. Now….he needed Epimetheus very badly. He needed him or he'd have to go to his masters in full failure, not partial.</p>
                    <p>Activating the power claw with a glowing crackling energy, he shouted, "So, Primarch, you dare to challenge the Warmaster of Chaos?"</p>
                    <p>Perturabo, body veiled in an orange light, growled, "You are not a Warmaster in any sense save that which the vomit of mortality deems you. Falsehood is not truth, no matter how its mewling braggarts seek to mislabel themselves thus." As Abaddon hurled himself at Perturabo, the Warmaster of the Imperium allowed his Iron Circle to unleash a protective warding circle, a product of the new Age of Faith.</p>
                    <p>Abaddon smashed against the circle, and as his claw sought purchase managed to land on his feet, hissing.</p>
                    <p>"So the mighty Primarch hides behind a shield, then? Are you a coward?"</p>
                    <p>Perturabo's grim smile did not change.</p>
                    <p>"You call upon your Gods for aid, and they answer you. Why then should I not call upon my own father, a father in truth and not like your own?"</p>
                    <p>The Primarch laughed, a sound like boulders grinding together. "My father respects me and listens to my guidance. Yours? Horus Lupercal betrayed the Imperium and he abandoned you to your hatred and attempt to anathematize him!"</p>
                    <p>Abaddon roared and swung at the shield with his power claw. The clashing energies of magic created a shockwave that flattened all save the Grey Knights, and even they left deep grooves in the ground where the energy drove them back, and displayed both drops of blood and whisps of smoke from the strain of holding to their feet.</p>
                    <p>With a slight gesture the shield fell and then Perturabo swung his Worldbreaker, catching Abaddon by surprise with the sheer speed of the attack. So too with the force of the blow, something that was a reminder of all the Empire had lost when his brothers had fallen asleep. The blow was of such sufficient power to hurl Abaddon into the sky, but calling upon the gifts granted to him by the Gods he managed to catch his fall in mid-air and lunged downward again, only for Perturabo's hammer to smash away the claw and for two rounds of his specialized anti-Warp bolters to strike into Abaddon's face and armor.</p>
                    <p>The Chaos taint on his armor made it permeable enough that Abaddon actually roared again in pain. So what Angron had told him after the Second Black Crusade, long before he had joined the Lupercal in the list of Primarchs destroyed by the power of the Chaos-Bane, had been true after all. Perturabo and the Grey Knights were, in the end, actually capable of hurting the Greater Daemons. He realized then that there would be no means to face Perturabo and salvage his original and true aim, or so he believed.</p>
                    <p>It was then that he saw Epimetheus sneaking up on his flank and as his eyes turned toward him, Worldbreaker was hurled in a two-handed swing by Perturabo, the swing capitalizing on every inch of power that both his armor and Thunder Hammer and the veneration of the Imperium's countless billions could give him. The blow came near to tearing off Abaddon's lower jaw and as it was, his blood sprayed out and he fell.</p>
                    <p>As he glared at the Primarch, who placed the hammer in front of him and his hands on the hammer, the Warding Field re-appeared.</p>
                    <p>"Are you going to kill me, Anathema-servant?"</p>
                    <p>"No."</p>
                    <p>The word stunned him.</p>
                    <p>"You have the enemy of all your accursed Imperium, servants of the False-Emperor all beholding this, and you will not kill me?"</p>
                    <p>"No. Not to me is it given to be the hand that kills you."</p>
                    <p>Abaddon then saw a vision from Tzeentch warning him to flee. If he did not soon the Master of Mankind would be present. He would need to cut his losses and let the Bloodthirster and Emerald Cave Prisoner lead the fight, as there was naught else he could do. Snarling, he swung his knife as the legions of the Warp began to manifest anew, and he laughed as he vanished into the crackling energy of a teleporter. Even as he did so, a brilliant golden light in the form of an Aquila appeared, and the legions of the Warp howled in dismay.</p>
                    <p>The Imperium's servants fell silent, and all, even the Warmaster, fell to their knees. The Imperial Guard and Inquisition prostrated themselves, speaking the Litany of Faith, while the Astartes knelt on both knees, hands raised in reverence at the sight of the deifically empowered entity. Behind him manifested three other forms in light, something that made Perturabo, kneeling on one knee smile genuinely.</p>
                    <p>He would at last have new battle-brothers, new Primarchs to take away the loneliness and to aid his father in the time needed to pursue his great quest.</p>
                    <p>The three Primarchs of the Second Founding looked at him.</p>
                    <p>One was very tall and massive, having elements of the old Horus in his physical appearance but crackling with the Psychic potency of Magnus.</p>
                    <p>The Emperor himself was between the Primarchs, and the other two manifested in armor very like those of the Grey Knights.</p>
                    <p>The Emperor gestured to all three of the new Primarchs, saying, "For ten thousand years I have labored to give my Grey Knights Primarchs worthy of their quest. To you I have given the Primarchs of the Second Founding, the hands that wield the unbreakable sword, the arms that bar with the Unbreakable Shield!"</p>
                    <p>As he spoke, the mightiest Daemon of Khorne roared in a challenge and they first saw the manifestation of the Prisoner in the Emerald Cave. The God-Emperor smiled.</p>
                    <p><strong>+You have no places here, Daemons of the Immaterium!</strong>+</p>
                    <p>The Daemons roared and burbled, respectively, before the Emperor spoke two words that shook the entire army and all the Primarchs, New and Old alike. The Daemons were appalled as he then favored them with a cynical look.</p>
                    <p>"I have spoken your true names! Depart now and your armies with you into the Warp from which you came!"</p>
                    <p>With that, the daemons suddenly vanished in a foul and sickly cloud as the Emperor turned to his three new Primarchs.</p>
                    <p>"Serapis, Adamantius, Aquillius, this is Warmaster Perturabo. When I am not on the field of battle personally, his orders are to you as mine own. Of all my Primarchs he has been my hammer, my indispensable terrible swift sword striking across the battles. I wish that you, my new Primarchs, work together with your chapter to dispel the remnants of Chaos on Pythos. My Warmaster and I have a task to accomplish in the Webway. When we are done, we shall send my flagship to take you with us to Terra. Great events shall finally be afoot, my sons."</p>
                    <p>With a crackling sensation the Emperor and Perturabo vanished.</p>
                    <p>XXXXXXXXX</p>
                    <p>The Imperial Battleship <em>Ferrus Manus: </em></p>
                    <p>"Where are we going, Father?"</p>
                    <p>"Simple, my Warmaster. We go to the Webway, to the Dark Eldar city. Your brother has languished too long in their captivity these last one thousand years."</p>
                    <p>Perturabo's eyes widened.</p>
                    <p>"Jaghatai's alive? Is he uncorrupted?"</p>
                    <p>His father's smile was genuine.</p>
                    <p>"Yes, he is alive. Between the two of us, it should not be long in freeing him."</p>
                    <p>Perturabo smiled, also genuinely.</p>
                    <p>"With the new Primarchs, and with my brother returned…the new Great Crusade shall be still greater than ever I imagined."</p>
                    <p>His father's hand went to his pauldron.</p>
                    <p>"The Eye of Terror will close, my son. And it shall never haunt your dreams again."</p>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. The Raid on Cormorragh:</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The Emperor and Perturabo go to Cormorragh to liberate the Khan from the clutches of Vect. Perturabo gets a troubling glimpse of the future.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="content">
  <p></p>
  <div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
    <p></p>
    <div class="page">
      <p></p>
      <div>
        <p></p>
        <div>
          <p>
            <em>Secret Prison, Cormorragh: </em>
          </p>
          <p>When the God-Emperor and his Warmaster manifested in Cormorragh, the dissipating energy seared into the buildings around them. The Dark Eldar sentries around the prison of Jagatai Khan were stunned by the light, and still more stunned by the towering figures that presented themselves before them. It had been an act of great risk to take captive the powerful Mon'Keigh warlord who'd torn through the Webway and destroyed entire fleets of Corsairs on his own. An act of madness, in a sense, that had torn the heart out of armies.</p>
          <p>The Scars, sons of the Warhawk God-Prince, had harried the children of the Dark City, and Vect knew that only the sheer size and superlative technology of his realm meant that it was no more than a set of smaller flesh wounds, not even a deterrent to the last scions of the old Eldar Empire. The Scars, but the Warmaster himself and the human God-King had never come to Cormorragh. Never, that is, until they had manifested in that sudden burst of light in the endless outer-darkness.</p>
          <p>Now it had brought the Mon'Keigh's father, the terrifying God-Emperor of Mankind, a figure of dread power who was carving still a distinct new path among the Webway and who had spent many centuries personally butchering entire communities of the Dark Eldar in alliance with their 'redeemed' weakling kindred. Few names among the Eldar had been as hated in Cormorragh as that of Eldrad Ulthan, the Arch-Traitor. Allied to the Mon'Keigh God-King, and the one who had ensured that no attempts to expand and to harry the worlds of the human colossus were possible to fully master. A colossus in golden armor whose very body emanated a light that burned with the fires of Order. A light before which the sickly warp-light of Cormorragh was as nothing, burned away and the eyes of the Eldar turning dark, almost like a mask.</p>
          <p>The wrath of the Emperor was terrifying to behold, and there was no less a sense of fear in the grim Warmaster, the Primarch of the dreaded Iron Warriors whose firearms and dreadful Iron Cages had been the doom of many a Dark Eldar fortress. The Dark Eldar soldiers prepared to call upon the dreadful Power that enslaved them only for the crackling light stored up in the Emperor's Power Claw to blaze forth, searing them into ashes, their bodies crumbling. Others, deterred from seeking to face the glowing God in their midst turned for the Demigod.</p>
          <p>A mistake. A very, very painful and dreadful mistake. Worldbreaker was in their midst with a speed that seemed unnatural given the immense hulking armored form of the Primarch. Speed for speed no Space Marine or Primarch would match the Dark Eldar, but with the added power granted by the veneration of the billions among the Imperium of Man, it was more than mere raw genhanced power that struck. Each shatteringly bloody fatal strike of Worldbreaker was a blow to avenge the captivity not merely of a battle-brother but in the hopes of Perturabo that his alone times were coming to an end.</p>
          <p>Between them, they made good work of the entire set of guards, and then they came to the prison. The Emperor simply clenched a fist and a blast of light smashed the door in. From it, they heard a voice:</p>
          <p>"Father?"</p>
          <p>It was Jagatai Khan, who stood, having snapped the neck of his captives, bloodied yet unbowed.</p>
          <p>"Father? It is you!" Grinning, he then knelt before his father as he saw Perturabo smiling and nodding toward him.</p>
          <p>"Perturabo?"</p>
          <p>"He is my Warmaster now."</p>
          <p>Jagatai blinked.</p>
          <p>"Come, my brother," as Perturabo extended his arm to him. The Khan took it. Before them, the Dark Eldar rose in power, the most elite of the Lord of Comorragh's soldiers rushing at the Emperor, only for the Emperor to place his sword by his side and summon to his hands a vast staff that he'd built for just this kind of purpose in the Long War against the Traitor Legions.</p>
          <p>The Emperor raised the staff, body glowing with his own Psyker abilities and the power of the Faith of the billions of the Imperium. The staff slammed into the ground and a brilliant flash of light and a howling gale incinerated wide swathes of Comorragh. By the time the light dissipated, the Emperor and the two Primarchs had vanished and a significant portion of the jail was gone and a near-quarter of this portion of Cormorragh's manpower with it. Vect did nothing, deeming it distinctly unwise to goad the Mon'Keigh iiving god, and regretted most that he had lost such an efficient pit-fighter. </p>
          <p>XXXXXXXXX</p>
          <p>On the Emperor's flagship, Jaghatai Khan listened with a fascinated glance, leaning inward, breathing heavily and lightly as elements of the story registered to the story of where things had been since he'd vanished early in the 30th Millennium.</p>
          <p>"So, I take it a lot's changed since last I vanished."</p>
          <p>Both Perturabo and the Emperor nodded.</p>
          <p>The Emperor spoke, "When last you left, Roboute was still Warmaster of the Imperium, and the Traitor Legions were driven to the Eye of Terror. It was not long from your disappearance that he met a brutal fate at the hands of Fulgrim and Mortarion."</p>
          <p>Perturabo nodded.</p>
          <p>"The two Traitor-Primarchs, one fallen into the utter abyss that is the Warp, the other not entirely so as yet assailed him on Maccrage. Perturabo fought with him, as he did with all of you when the time was needed."</p>
          <p>The Warmaster nodded. "So I did. In what the superstitious now call the Battle of the Four Primarchs, Roboute fell into a terrible coma, and I ended up retreating with him after breaking Mortarion's leg with Worldbreaker sufficiently to a point that Fulgrim decided to cut his losses. Even the fell daemons of the Warp cannot simply abandon their masters' pawns.</p>
          <p>Corax, Russ, Johnson, they all fell too."</p>
          <p>His face grew haunted with a terrible memory.</p>
          <p>"In the Second Black Crusade, however, as the Traitors called their wars against the Imperium," he sighed, "Dorn drew me into a terrible trap. His price to ascend to a daemon prince of Chaos, and he did so with what he termed an Iron Cage. I was drawn into it in hopes of destroying him and stopping his ascension. 200 of my best warriors, and my first Trident, were destroyed. But the rest escaped, and I with them.</p>
          <p>It was when I returned, learning that Russ and Corax were gone, that I was appointed the third Warmaster of the Imperium. Successor of the Traitor, and of Roboute. And for ten thousand years I waged my Long War against the threat of the Traitor Legions, no knowing that was the next millennium that the new threat appeared for the first time. The first elements of the Tyranid Hive Fleets. The Necrons have also awakened. Ancient Artificials, animated by a perverse faith in their Star Gods, intent on waging a war until life is a silent tomb as coarse and brutal as their own."</p>
          <p>The Emperor spoke, continuing his own side of the tale, "For ten thousand years the Long War has been waged. Eleven grand False Crusades waged by Abaddon, inheritor of Horus. In that time Perturabo and I have destroyed Alpharius and Omegon, and we have been the strongest arm of the Imperium against the Daemon-Primarchs. Angron, too, freed from his misery. He.....thanked me. That day." A shadow crossed over the Emperor's face, a lingering trace of humanity on a being which had long since ceased to be truly human. "It is thanks to the mighty deeds of Perturabo and his Iron Warriors that the Long War is less hopeless than it would be. He deciphered a means to use the Blanks in a fashion that I had not foreseen, most obscure of all Psykers, and to take the concept of Servitors down new paths. I am proud of my son, for he has shown me visions that were beyond my initial writ. For each False Crusade aimed at the Imperium, a Great Crusade into the Eye of Terror has been launched.</p>
          <p>We have shrunk the Warp-wound by a third, though it continues to bleed. The last False Crusade was two thousand years ago, since then the Imperium has largely fought Necrons and the Tyranids. We estimate the Hive Fleets we've faced thus far are but miniscule portions of overall fleets that are striking at the Galaxy from straight head on and below. The Necrons…." The Master of Mankind sighed, "They have been more straightforwardly dealt with as they appear."</p>
          <p>"It has been too long, brother." Perturabo smiled with an unusually generous smile, "I have fought alone too long. I am glad you have come back to us."</p>
          <p>Jaghatai nodded. "Ten thousand years?"</p>
          <p>His eyes widened.</p>
          <p>"I get to command my sons again?"</p>
          <p>"You do," the Emperor said, and he smiled, taking Jaghatai's hand in his own.</p>
          <p>"And you will be able to meet your new brothers as well, my new Primarchs who command my Grey Knights."</p>
          <p>Jagatai blinked. "So Perturabo and I will have Battle Brothers to accompany us?"</p>
          <p>"You will."</p>
          <p>XXXXXX</p>
          <p>That evening Perturabo was shaken by a strange vision. Terra was bleeding light, strange and eerie veins of glowing gold that marked the planet in an unnatural pattern of bizarre geometric configurations. The Imperial Palace oozed that same unhallowed light, but he was hovering over it in a jump-pack, awed and crying for reasons he did not understand. Within the Palace he could see and not see an immense man in armor mutating into a strange many-angled being with angles that should be obtuse acute and with a curiously cubic aspect, and then the brilliant flash of light began to ripple out as he escaped with the last survivors of the doomed Earth into his flagship, the Iron Warriors solemnly beholding the birth of something new and terrible, the last of humanity's home left, and Perturabo alone refusing to ascend to this perverted future, now the Master of a still more shattered Mankind ravaged by the deadly birth pangs of a new and unhallowed deity. The moment passed. But Perturabo, who sank for a few hours into a Sus-An coma shaken by what he'd seen didn't understand what to make of it beyond the impression that he would need to evacuate as much of the population of Terra offworld as he could, to preserve some last traces of what was in the wake of what would be…..</p>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Twists and Turns and the Solemnace Crusade:</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>One who was presumed dead proves the rumors of his death exaggerated, and the Primarchs and Emperor go to Solemnace to free Vulkan from the clutches of Trazyn the Infinite.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Imperial Palace, Terra: </strong>
</p><p>Jaghatai Khan looked with awe at the Imperial Palace.</p><p>"I knew you were beginning to rebuild it after I'd vanished. Truly did you have a greater gift to build than even with fighting."</p><p>Only after he'd finished that statement did the Khan realize that what he'd intended for a compliment might be seen as an insult by the Warmaster of the Imperium. But instead of reacting violently, Perturabo favored him with a surprisingly human smile.</p><p>"That is Father's own view, now. He believes had he allowed me to build from the beginning that I might have been still more steadfast than I was. But I complain not."</p><p>Jaghatai, seeing his White Scars beginning to assemble and glorying in the prospect of greeting his gene-sons, then paused for a moment. He had not insulted Perturabo once, but telling his brother that hearing him say "I complain not" quite sincerely led him to wonder if this was the same dour and vengeful petulant entity he'd known so long ago would probably not go nearly as well. Parsing his words carefully and grateful that the massing of his sons and their chapter, and all their successor chapters was going as smoothly as it was, he then spoke, much more slowly and more carefully:</p><p>"When I left to pursue the Dark Eldar into the Webway, I remember that our dear brother Roboute was breaking up legions into chapters and that I told him I'd see him in Hell, first. How did you preserve the Iron Warriors as a Legion?"</p><p>Perturabo smiled with a sad and slightly bitter smile, and he spoke, "My brother heard directly from me in my own words that I had not fought on Father's side against someone who dissipated the strength of the Iron Warriors to allow the victors against the False Warmaster to achieve by diplomacy what he had not by blood and iron."</p><p>Jagatai blinked. "Ah, I thought you'd gone to pursue Dorn."</p><p>"No, not then. Not yet. Roboute gave me a task I believe he intended as an insult to make me turn and fight him and achieve by blood and iron what he understood diplomacy would not. Instead I took my Iron Warriors and we rebuilt Ultramar after his great war with the Word Bearers. The heretics we burned, the Ultramar children we interned in great mausoleums."</p><p>Perturabo grinned.</p><p>"When Roboute returned we'd rebuilt his empire such that he looked upon me with awe and said that it was an error to have assigned me to dig in the mud, for I had found Ultramar brick and left it marble. First time I'd ever heard such kindness from his lips."</p><p>Then he sighed, "So he allowed me to retain the IV Legion as a Legion, something that meant I was able to break Dorn's Iron Cage even if I couldn't stop the wretched bastard from becoming a filthy thing of the Powers."</p><p>For a mere moment in time Jagatai caught in the sudden coldness like boulders grinding together of Perturabo's words a hint of a Perturabo who could have been, a mighty colossus of merged iron and flesh enhanced by the powers of the Warp.</p><p>"I was drawn after the Battle of the Four Primarchs into the Iron Cage of Dorn, seeking to avenge my fallen brothers, and perhaps to die myself. Dorn tried to persuade me to join the Ruinous Powers, saying that while they adored having him on their side, that I was their original desire, not him. He believed such words would have won me over, and that they were praise."</p><p>Then Perturabo smiled again and the smile did have a more than vaguely sinister element. "Alas for Dorn I simply smashed him in the face with Worldbreaker and he and I had our last interaction as human beings."</p><p>For a moment, after this, Perturabo was silent and then he made another longer, all too human sigh. "Ten thousand years alone. We may be demigods, creations of the Master of Mankind, but whatever else our Father is, a parent he is not. I have missed having my battle-brothers to fight beside me, to wage a war along side me and to strengthen the race of mankind as it must be strengthened."</p><p>The moment passed and he then clasped Jaghatai's hand and the two raised them in a mutual salute, "So I am deeply grateful to have you back, brother, and to have one less burden taken from my shoulders. Ten thousand years have left me, a man already prone to dourness and paranoia only the worse for this. The Imperium, due to Father's focusing on building and raising properly and blooding properly his new Primarchs, and due to his destruction of the Alpha Legion, has taken more from me than it should.</p><p>Alone among us you believe in freedom as it should be. The Imperium can only grow the greater with the Khan and his White Scars at last working hand in glove with the sons of Olympias, the Grey Knights, and the Iron Warriors and all the Chapter-Astartes."</p><p>Jaghatai smiled.</p><p>XXXXXXXXXXX</p><p>Before the Imperial Palace the White Scars and all eight of their successor chapters were assembled, not knowing quite what to expect. The rumors of their Primarch's return had filtered amazingly fast, and the idea that the Warmaster was at last allowing them to assemble not as chapters but as a Legion entire, this had drawn to them curiosity. The Legion, recreated in the old lines of the Horus Heresy-era organization, was many times more immense than it had been, some eighteen to twenty times. Yet all of the Space Marines in it were awed when the Warmaster and the Emperor appeared.</p><p>The Emperor took their salutes by raising his sword that flashed with fire and unleashed a tongue of flame into the air, and then withdrew slightly that Warmaster Perturabo might speak:</p><p>"Children of Chogoris! After many long years, I give you the fulfillment of your ancient dreams! Behold, the Khan who redeemed your world and has at last come among you once more!"</p><p>Jaghatai stood forth, raising his sword and hearing the cheers of his Legion, and his eyes moistened with tears of gratitude. The father then spoke to his sons, promising them "Vengeance against the treacherous Dark Eldar wherever these foul xenos appear unabashed and unshamed in the realms of the Imperium! But above all else, we are now once more a Legion in full! The days of the Guilliman Codex have ended, my sons!</p><p>I, your Primarch, am among you once more and we shall unleash without hesitation the greatest and the most destructive power of the old days that all the Immaterium shall tremble at our approach!"</p><p>The roar was deafening, but Jaghatai relished it. It was time indeed to prepare his own legion to fulfill whatever the designs of the Warmaster and the Emperor, Master of Mankind, were. He had been a pit fighter for far too long. It was time to be the hunter again, and to rove. His father understood him and whatever the changes in Perturabo, he understood that if his brother didn't, well.....he could always roam to the edges of the Imperium slaying its foes again. It had been too long and he ached for that rush.</p><p>XXXXXXXXX</p><p>
  <strong>Laboratories of Fabius Bile, Eye of Terror: </strong>
</p><p>Fabius Bile smiled at his Replicae Projects. For many long years he had sought to create his own ultimate product, the mightiest of all possible weapons, a servant to Warmaster Abaddon that would make his latest Black Crusade worth more than ever he could have imagined. With the addition of what he had hoped and craved for from the Dark Eldar, gathered in the wake of the presence of the Master of Mankind in the destructive clash in their world, he could at last achieve it. It would be a suitable means to demonstrate his resurrection, though he knew that the original Fabius, the being who had been in the old III Legion from the time of the Blight was dead. He was a clone, more Fabius II than the true Fabius but what did such things matter in the Warp? Fabius he was, Fabius he would remain.</p><p>His tanks were active, and within a span of a few hours as the Eye of Terror defined them, he would at last have both his ultimate weapon and a means to even depose the Despoiler and grant Chaos a proper leader, a Counter to the Master of Mankind. The clones of the Emperor, whom the Primogenitor intended to have battle one another for superiority so that he could present the winner, grew apace.</p><p>Fabius savored the irony, feeling like the Emperor himself in the Himalazian Mountains gazing upon his Primarchs. As he looked, he was startled when one of his creation's eyes opened, and the being within the tank suddenly looked at him. He would be still more startled when crackling lightning-spikes of Psychic energy began to course from the tank as his creation began to flex its muscles.</p><p>All of a sudden Fabius realized that perhaps, with some things, the wanting of them was better than the attaining of success.</p><p> </p><p></p><div class="content">
  <p> </p>
  <p></p>
  <div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
    <p> </p>
    <p></p>
    <div class="page">
      <p> </p>
      <p></p>
      <div>
        <p> </p>
        <p></p>
        <div>
          <p>
            <strong>The Eye of Terror, Harmony: </strong>
          </p>
          <p>Abaddon the Despoiler looked with anger and contempt upon the towering figures that loomed before him. Once, in life, the thing immediately before him had been Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of the Word-Bearers. Now it was a Daemon Primarch, a ruined and twisted type of lifeform. To his left was the Daemon-Lord of Medrengard, ruler with an iron fist of the Imperial Fists, the Sons of Dorn, the most fiendishly conventional of Chaos's forces. Before his campaign to Pythos and his failure to attain the vessel for the Avatar of Slaanesh, he'd found himself in the favor of the Powers.</p>
          <p>Now, with a true failure at hand, Abaddon was faced with the reality that only now did the Daemon Primarchs seek to take their own roles into conventional space. The tall and monstrous figure that had been Aurelian spoke with the ruined and twisted vocalizations of the Warp, the terrible howling of the Neverborn, a voice that chilled even one as hardened as Abaddon.</p>
          <p>"The Ruinous Powers do not favor you so much now, Despoiler. Many are your successes in your Black Crusades, but it only takes one failure to anger Them." He laughed, an ugly sound.</p>
          <p>"Long did I meditate on that world, but when you well and truly failed, Despoiler, until Their wrath aroused by your failures awoke me to return to this Long War at last. You were sent to draw a vessel for a God, and now, upon your failure, the Dark Prince has vanished."</p>
          <p>Abaddon straightened.</p>
          <p>"How does a God vanish?"</p>
          <p>The Daemon Prince laughed, a cold and cruel sound. "A feral world near the Eye of Terror, one of the few places where the cores of the races made by the Old Ones grew, was overwhelmed at last by the Ruinous Powers and cast into the Eye. A stripling-deity held by the Lord of Changes broke free of his imprisonment and led a doomed bid to withstand the conquest of a Feral World within the False-Emperor's Empire. The stripling failed, but he was reborn as the God-King of Sigmaron, and in a quest to initiate a strike with his daemons against ours, a set of his allies, debased relatives of the Eldar, overcame a glutted and fattened and enfeebled Dark Prince with ease."</p>
          <p>Rogal Dorn's echoing bellow that had once been a rumbling basso in life followed, "And so the Ruinous Powers at last entrust to us command of power within the Materium. We shall begin, Despoiler, by unleashing a secret weapon that has been hidden within the Imperial Palace all these years. Did you think that an eternity of suffering in a stasis field was something even Guilliman could endure without seeking a way out?"</p>
          <p>Dorn's smile was terrifying. "Roboute has at last fallen to the Blood God. We have awakened him and he has healed indeed. Let our father the so-called God-Emperor see what happens when he faces another of his sons who has fallen even as the skulking Khan comes crawling back to him." The terrible laughter of Dorn and Aurelian echoed and re-echoed in the Palace that the Despoiler used as a base, the sound of the endless and ethereal madness of the Warp enhanced with the raw destructive force of the Primarchs.</p>
          <p>Temple of Guilliman, Terra:</p>
          <p>The Temple had for a change been cleared of visitors due to the amazement surrounding the return of Jaghatai Khan. Only two Ultramarines remained on guard, and that was fortunate. Within the field, Guilliman's eyes opened, turning black as his gauntlets began to flex. A deep bestial sound echoed, as his body began to move. With a sudden overpowering force the Stasis Field shattered as Roboute Guillliman stood up. Already a towering man as a Primarch, he grew double in height and half as wide in breadth, his feet transforming into hooves, his hands manifesting claws.</p>
          <p>Out of a blood-like hue he formed a great club and his rumbling and now malformed voice hissed <strong>Blood for the Blood God</strong>.</p>
          <p>Terrified, the Ultramarines remained fixed in place and the thing that had been Guilliman struck forth, the spiked red club hewing them in half with trivial effort, savoring the smell.</p>
          <p>Striding forward, he then saw before him in a sudden flash of light three figures. On the right a tall man in armor, with a truly magnificent mustache wielding an equally epic sword. On the left, the new Warmaster who'd succeeded him, Perturabo. In Perturabo's hands was the massive maul Worldbreaker, which had destroyed countless foes of all kinds in the name of the God-Emperor of the Imperium. And in the center the figure whose ever-shifting face did not detract from the majesty of his golden armor, a figure whose light nearly blinded him.</p>
          <p>The Emperor said to his son, "I am sorry, my son, that you have fallen."</p>
          <p>The thing that wore his son's flesh spoke in an unhallowed fashion that rumbled through the Temple: <strong>So the False Emperor comes before me with his cringing stripling sons. I shall take great pleasure in hewing the flesh from your bones, Anathema. </strong></p>
          <p>The Emperor remained silent, and then as the monster surged forth with blinding speed, the sword of the Khan and the hammer of Perturabo sliced and smashed into him with sufficient speed to hew off one of his legs and force him to the ground as the Emperor, without breaking a stride stood in front of him.</p>
          <p>The monster's leg remained hewed but he suddenly swept both his hands, hurling both of the other Primarchs off, while grasping his club to raise himself up. Using it as a crutch he formed a blade from the same substance that had formed into the club, howling the name of Khorne as the Emperor raised his own blade. The blade of the Blood God swept downward and the firey sword of the Emperor blocked it, before the Emperor's crackling psychic abilities surged forth and cleaved through the blade, sweeping to the side and cleaving the club, knocking Guilliman back down.</p>
          <p>As the Emperor glowed, his eyes flashed with fire. Guilliman hissed: <strong>You made me into th</strong>-the blast of Soulfire cleansed his body, shattering his soul as Horus's had been shattered. No promise of restoration, no sense of hope from the return of the Prince of Ultramar. Only death and the laughter of thirsting Gods. That day geologists monitoring events on Terra noticed something frightening, a strange golden band of psychic light began to emanate beneath the Imperial Palace, a band that began to spread and spider-web across the planet. The resemblance to the warnings of the dream of the Warmaster Perturabo led to a quiet acceleration of the steady evacuation of the Infrastructure of Terra.</p>
          <p>
            <em> <strong>The Malcador, the Imperial Flagship: </strong> </em>
          </p>
          <p>As the Emperor teleported himself and his sons to the ship, he sat upon the great throne that was always there on any ship the Emperor used. Fashioned into the form of an immense golden lion in honor of his son, Primarch of the Dark Angels, the Emperor gazed out quietly.</p>
          <p>"Where shall we go first, Father?"</p>
          <p>Perturabo, his hammer slung at his back asked the question as his gauntlet stroked his chin, studying the map of various worlds where far-flung foes assailed the Imperium. Their father's eyes glowed as his voice echoed with the power of a figure of divine proportions, one whose power had only grown the greater after millennia of worship.</p>
          <p>"Solemnace. We go to rescue your brother. My agents' psychic reports have finally reached me and I have pinned his location down at last. Vulkan lives, and he is held by the supposed Necron Lord Trazyn the Infinite. He shall be Infinite no more."</p>
          <p>The two Primarchs nodded.</p>
          <p>"We shall take with us," their father continued, "two full Legions. The entirety of the White Scars and the Iron Warriors. They shall hold the Necrons' attention as I free your brother, and ensure the destruction of the Tomb-World thereafter. When I give the signal, you shall withdraw your men and I shall hold the Necrons fixed upon me until I unleash the Imperial Exterminatus."</p>
          <p>Both brothers nodded and as Jagatai grinned with anticipation of a true battle, Perturabo's usually dour face was likewise marked.</p>
          <p>"As Warmaster, Perturabo, you shall command the vanguard and three chapters of Ultramarines and their successors, as well as your Iron Warriors. You shall engage his forces in the field. The Scars," as he turned to the Khan, "shall ravage and destroy his artifacts, serving as the beaters to draw out the Necrons that the Iron Warriors and Ultramarines shall annihilate them. Vengeance shall be ours."</p>
          <p>The Emperor then smiled as he said, "To war!"</p>
          <p>The chant of the gathered Primarchs and captains of the Legions and Chapter Masters was deafening and heady:</p>
          <p>"Revere the God-Emperor, expel the Xenos!"</p>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div><div class="content">
  <p> </p>
  <p></p>
  <div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
    <p> </p>
    <p></p>
    <div class="page">
      <p> </p>
      <p></p>
      <div>
        <p> </p>
        <p></p>
        <div>
          <p>
            <strong>Solemnace, Citadel of Trazyn the Infinite: </strong>
          </p>
          <p>The Necron Lord looked at the skies around his world with a detached serenity in his green eyes. There was something appropriate, if strange in the sight. The God in Gold was going to storm his world when he ran out of means to divert his searchers. This was, of course, rather inevitable, really. So came the long-awaited reckoning. He was, however, stunned at the sight of the raw psychic power of the Emperor unleashed in wrath, of entire Necron fleets dissolving into fire and ash cluttering up the Void.</p>
          <p>The <em>Malcador</em>, the <em>Olympias</em>, and the <em>Chogoris</em>. The flagships of the Emperor, his Warmaster, and the first of the Lost Ones to return from the far reaches of space. Against them the vast fleet that Trazyn the Infinite had amassed, and with the God's wrath unfolding in sheer destructive scale the fleet might as well have been kept in reserve for all the good it did. Trazyn was no longer mortal enough to snarl but the blazing of his eyes was evidence enough as to what that meant.</p>
          <p>Vast armies of warriors and Canoptek Spyders and Canoptek Wraiths were being gathered, but the ability of the psychic powers of the Emperor to shatter entire ships full of highly trained void fighters without much of any resistance did not augur well for resistance. Oh, his armies might inflict some damage on some of the Astartes, but whenever Necrons faced the Iron Warriors they were incapable of inflicting equivalent damage as to other forces.</p>
          <p>The personal Legion of Warmaster Perturabo not only struck in overpowering force but eschewed lighter armor for tremendous enough firepower to even rock the vast armies of Necrons on their heels. The Iron Warriors had even obliterated two entire Tomb Worlds in full, the only time anything outside the Warp had done so. The degree of shock this induced meant that the Necrons were intent on avoiding drawing Iron Warriors to their presence.</p>
          <p>And now the Warmaster and his entire Legion were bearing down on him combined with Ultramarines and the entire gathered White Scars, a Legion of whom the Necrons knew very little. All things considered, he hoped it would be a good battle. The forces of the Imperium made planetfall, as to be true was in all cases inevitable. When the Master of Mankind personally commanded armies, there was nothing the Necrons could do to crush him or the armies he led. Indeed, the power and faith in the might of the Emperor that coursed through the Astartes, supercharged by his presence, meant their Gauss weapons were capable of inflicting deep scars and boiling injuries but not being outright fatal.</p>
          <p>The Imperium's forces made planetfall, the sons of Chogoris sweeping forward, their Primarch in the van, his sword deftly tearing through Necrons as though they were nothing. The Warmaster for his part led his Trident, the belligerent Kroeger storming through the Necrons with nothing to hinder him, the towering form of Barban Falk an immense and unstoppable tide of destructive force drowning the vast armies in Necrodermis with next to nothing to hinder him. So too with Forrix, whose immense Thunder Hammer smashed apart the Canopteks with next to nothing to withstand its swings.</p>
          <p>And before all of this, the immense speed and skill of the Warmaster was something to behold. In his improved and modified Cataphracti armor, the Warmaster's speed and devastating force mixed in with that of his Iron Circle meant that entire armies seemed to wither before the Primarch in half the speed that they had with the Iron Warriors. Where the Iron Warriors maneuvered, immense rolling waves of firepower smashed aside what the Necrons hastily constructed.</p>
          <p>Necrons were marked by capably directed walls of firepower, the siege-inclinations of the Iron Warriors carrying with them steel storms of such power that even Necrons could not fully withstand them. Trazyn cursed in a low burst of binary, realizing that the Imperium had caught his forces in the midst of preparation, precisely when they were most vulnerable. So it would be a war, then, and one where he had the disadvantage. His orbital forces were scattered, and both the Emperor and the Warmaster and now a second Primarch were overtly engaged in war against him.</p>
          <p>Inside Trazyn's palace, Vulkan rose to his feet, grasping his Thunder Hammer. He heard the sound of warfare beginning and when he looked out to see the onset of landings by Imperial forces, including his own father, a part of him relished at last being freed from the silent scream, knowing that it was his father's psychic presence that had done so. As he grasped his hammer and strode forth to face Trazyn's guards, Vulkan grinned with a smile that was chilling enough that had the Necrons been beings of flesh and blood they would have quailed.</p>
          <p>He spoke: "The hour of vengeance is nigh." The hammer began to swing and Necron bodies were blasted apart as he sought to break out of the palace. Sensing the psychic presence of his son, the Emperor and his Custodes soon zeroed in on that presence. Activating an aspect of his Psyker abilities he seldom used directly on the battlefield, the Emperor left to the Warmaster for a few moments direct command of his forces as he and his Custodes appeared in a flash of light where Vulkan's hammer swung through the Necrons.</p>
          <p>Vulkan's eyes widened. "It is you, father."</p>
          <p>The Emperor nodded.</p>
          <p>As more Necrons arrived, the Emperor's eyes glowed and his Power Claw crackled with a blue witch-fire and then a sudden roiling column of the flame lanced out, smashing and annihilating an entire column, before being used with sufficient power to tear down an entire wall of Trazyn's palace. As the Primarch of the Salamanders went with his father in the sudden maneuver back to the battlefield, Vulkan found himself facing the sight of the swiftly moving Thunder-Hammer of Peturabo. Neither of them noticed that their Father had strode into the palace of Trazyn the Infinite for a moment, reliant on his Warp-speed, searching for something. </p>
          <p>They noticed still less when he paused at one of Trazyn's collections, and took three objects from it. The first was a great sword with a magick potency to it, with a graceful looping golden pommel and a brilliant golden sigil on the blade. The Emperor paused for a moment with a soft, almost reminiscent smile. The other two were more esoteric, wraith-like energy bound in  a miniature labyrinth, much as he had bound the C'Tan on Mars. The energy here was starkly familiar, and the softer smile became harder and then almost haunted. His power claw caressed the energy with almost a lover's caress and then it was sent away with the sword with the Custodes.</p>
          <p>The Emperor did not know how of all beings to gain access to that sword Trazyn the Infinite was one of them. He was not particularly sure he wanted to, but it would be fitting for that sword to join the only other artifacts of its kind. A gemstone shaped like a heart, an object of great power that deceptively appeared like a mirror and was a realm that with sufficient training and experimentation he had deciphered....and a sword like a scimitar with a red jewel-adorned pommel that glinted most brightly when next to the mirror. The last traces of the first guardians of Sol. Soon to be together, and reunited.</p>
          <p>"Brother."</p>
          <p>Perturabo smiled genuinely. "Brother."</p>
          <p>He pointed to where the Khan on his bike was lancing through Necrons, disrupting cohesive forces and rendering them dislocated wrecks.</p>
          <p>"I doubt the Khan would mind if you joined him in demolishing Trazyn's hordes." Vulkan grinned and waded forward, his hammer destroying Necrons by the tens and then the hundreds, scattering their bodies with such force that the Necrodermis could not fully repair itself in their presence.</p>
          <p>Trazyn, who'd rushed back to his palace just as the Emperor had left, realized that the Emperor had already attained what he wished this early in the fight. No, it wasn't a good battle. If, however, he could manipulate things properly by manipulating what reserves were available to him on planet, it might be a war he could still salvage. Judging by the degree to which three Primarchs and the Emperor were annihilating his forces before him, however, that was a rather open question.</p>
          <p>For the Primarchs, the chances to fight together on the same battlefield for the first time in years was one of splendor. Where the Khan's terrible swift sword hewed down the Necrons with impartiality, dealing blows of such splendor that the metal could not repair itself, the blinding speed and devastating force of Perturabo made him seem a veritable titan of Iron behind whom the torn metal grew the greater. Vulkan's thunder hammer swung with abandon and glee, vengeance at last achieved for thousands of years within Trazyn's collection room.</p>
          <p>The armies of the Necrons had been caught in the midst of preparations to withstand an invasion and so their reactions were punch-drunk, slow. Numbers that might have prevailed even against the Primarchs and the Emperor were wasted in dribs and drabs and piecemeal assaults easily beaten back by the superiority of the war-waging power of the Ultramarines, White Scars, and Iron Warriors assigned to fighting on Solemnace.</p>
          <p>In the skies, Void warfare denied the Necrons the chance to send reinforcements, the brutish firepower of Iron Warriors ships combining with the tactical virtuosity (if predictability) of the Ultramarines and the swiftness of the White Scars to negate any prepared aspect of Necron counterattacks. Indeed, the under-lords of the Necrons soon decided that such attempts were futile and decided to leave Trazyn in his fate. If he drew the Iron Warriors to Solemnace, then may he burn on his own pyre of arrogance.</p>
          <p>The battlefield was a familiar sight, the glowing green energy of Necron Gauss energy contrasting with the shouts and screams of Imperial Adeptes Astartes and the destructive power of their chainswords and chainaxes as they tore through their armies. Trazyn the Infinite himself, gazing at the chaos soon issued an order that he ensured was forcibly followed. His armies would retreat to the devastated palace and there dig in. Perhaps he might not win the battle, but if he made the Emperor's sons bleed and his Asartes rue the day they faced him, he might extract from them such infamy that the name of Trazyn the Infinite would never be forgotten so long as existence itself endured.</p>
          <p>The armies of the Necrons withdrew with a surprising degree of effectiveness and skill, while other armies across of Solemnace were sent there as their first orders. With a swiftness typical of the former servants turned slayers of the Star Gods, the partially gutted palace became a fortification. Recognizing what Trazyn intended, the Emperor spoke to his Custodes and then to his Primarchs.</p>
          <p>"If the monster wishes a fight, to him a fight shall be given." Taking advantage in turn of the chances provided them, Vulkan was assigned to command the Ultramarines and their successor chapters on-world, the Chapters forming the right, the Ultramarines simply grateful that their Primarch's fall didn't rebound on them or the Master of Mankind's trust in them. The Iron Warriors formed the centerpoint, and for a change did not mind the chance to ply their trade in the trenches beneath the gaze of the Emperor. The White Scars formed the left.</p>
          <p>Expecting to command a siege, Warmaster Perturabo was surprised when the Emperor revealed a different plan. In lieu of giving the foe the fight he wished, the Emperor wished instead to exploit the very weakness of the circular defense Trazyn was building. As the Primarchs listened solemnly, their faces as one became marked by mutually carnivorous smiles. The gathered might of two Legions and multiple successor chapters maneuvered in turn a week later, heading to Trazyn's palace. During the week's lapse, a full-strength force of Imperial Guard was added to augment their numbers and to provide a diversion to hold Trazyn's attention just long enough for the greater plan to work.</p>
          <p>The Tomb-Lord stood impassively, holding the Empathic Obliterator. As he expected, the foolish servants of the Emperor and their sniveling Godling had merely gathered a great army of Astartes only to send ordinary humans in a set of hammering attacks all around his lines. Whatever struck everything, in the end, could not break through anything. He was serene until the news hit him that under the direct command of the Emperor and the Warmaster, a tremendous column of Space Marines led by all three Primarchs was striking at a point in his line where the Imperial Guard had withdrawn.</p>
          <p></p>
          <div class="content">
            <p></p>
            <div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
              <p></p>
              <div class="page">
                <p></p>
                <div>
                  <p> </p>
                  <p></p>
                  <div>
                    <p>
                      <strong>The Citadel of Trazyn the Infinite: </strong>
                    </p>
                    <p>By any objective standard the tremendous mass of Necron forces surrounding the castle, even at a weak point, were among the most numerous foes any force of the Imperium had faced since the Ullanor Crusade and the Seventh and Ninth Black Crusades. Objective, however, did not quite cover a battlefield where at the vanguard was the God-Emperor of Mankind, clad in ornate Artificier armor, and his son, Warmaster Perturabo, the grim Lord of Iron.</p>
                    <p>Nor did it cover the figure of splendor and dread wrath that was Vulkan the Undying, his baroque armor now a thing of dread and not mockery even to the undying Necrons and their skeletal frameworks. Nor, in truth, the glorious sword-work of Jagatai Khan, who in spite of bringing a sword to a battlefield riven and marked with some dead Astartes (and the Apothecaries salvaging their gene-seed), many more scattered Necrons and the glowing and terrible psychic might of the Master of Mankind.</p>
                    <p>Such was the power of the Emperor and the group of Custodes behind him that the forces of the Necrons withered, as the Iron Warriors and the White Scars and Ultramarines successfully exploited the initial breakthroughs to tear through the lines. The Necrons, once more caught off-guard, were unable to concentrate or reverse their positioning in sufficient time to thwart the joint determination of the immense might of several full-strength legions of the Astartes and three Primarchs. A sight not seen, at that, since the Horus Heresy.</p>
                    <p>Within his palace, Trazyn sat on his throne, aware that he was now facing his own downfall. Well, if that were so, then he would seek out the Master of Mankind and give the golden-armored godling a fight to reckon with. The Necrons, after all, had slain Gods before…..</p>
                    <p>
                      <strong>The Eye of Terror, Abaddon the Despoiler's Base: </strong>
                    </p>
                    <p>The monstrous creature that had once been Rogal Dorn gazed at the small band of figures that resented all that they had done for their gene-sire only for the great resenter at being forgotten to forget them in turn. A single Grand Company of Iron Warriors in all the Long War had fallen, and that recently in the Thirty-Ninth Millennium. Abaddon had hesitated to make full use of these servants of the Ruinous Powers but with him in bad odor, the Daemon Primarchs had no such hesitation.</p>
                    <p>Dorn looked at Warsmith Andraaz, and in particular at the chain but arrogantly smiling appearances of the two Obliterators. Obliterators, figures of dread and horror that only appeared at times with the Imperial Fists, and then seldom as completely as they did with the Iron Warriors. Of course Imperial Fists tended to fall more toward Khorne. In seeing the Iron Warriors' confidence and their ability to withstand the Eye of Terror, he realized then why the Powers had sought them all those years ago.</p>
                    <p>Remembering that he was seen as an inferior second choice drew Dorn's wrath and he rose to his feet, but as he readied a blow he halted. He was a Daemon Primarch, these striplings were mere mutants. What use wasting wrath on the undeserving.</p>
                    <p><strong>Warsmith Andraaz,</strong> his voice boomed with savage satisfaction, <strong>you are assigned a task on behalf of the Ruinous Powers. Go forth to the Iron Warriors garrison on Armageddon, and strike your brothers. Be sure to make full use of Merihem and Oriax, and especially Over-Captain Honsou, for seldom is it given to a Chaos force to have two such warriors. The End Times are rising, go forth to strike as the herald of Outer Darkness. </strong></p>
                    <p>The Warsmith knelt on one knee. "As you will, Lord Dorn." Power claw crackling, the Iron Warriors, with their two Warsmiths, Andraaz and the renegade Kraegon Thul, vanquished Lord (and last of an entire Grand Company) from the world of Malodrax entered ships. It was with a kind of latent excitement that they did so. Now, after their brothers had forgotten them, it would be at last that an Iron Warrior band that went the proper direction would strike.</p>
                    <p>While Merihem and Oriax were the most blessed by the Ruinous Powers in one way, only Andraaz had been fully blessed by all of them. Indeed, to a degree, these blessings had made him almost a second kind of Daemon-Primarch, less a formerly post-human demigod of War and more a resurrected shade to a degree of Lupercal himself at the height of his powers. Such was the refusal of the Powers to accept that those they deemed theirs by right could ever refuse them.</p>
                    <p>As Dorn looked to Abaddon, the deep sneer and grinding teeth of Abaddon showed Dorn that the insult had set in properly. Good.</p>
                    <p>
                      <strong>The Citadel of Trazyn the Infinite:</strong>
                    </p>
                    <p>The Emperor and his Primarchs had entered his citadel, and thus was it that Trazyn strode forth to meet them.</p>
                    <p>"So, Godling, you have broken my lines. I call to you to a contest of champions. I, the Tomb-Lord of this world, versus the Master of Mankind that superstitious apes worship as their God."</p>
                    <p>The Emperor's sword burned with fire.</p>
                    <p>
                      <strong>+Challenge accepted.+</strong>
                    </p>
                    <p>The use of psychic power as a response was a deliberate goad to Trazyn, and in the wake of the ruin inflicted and the ease with which the Imperium was able to dismantle all that he'd built, with the realization that even as the Emperor accepted the challenge the Space Marines and Primarchs were looting what was useful and annihilating and burning the rest, all combined to make the ancient Tomb Lord less the strategist with long-term plans he'd envisioned himself as and more a revenant howling for revenge.</p>
                    <p>The Empathic Obliterator lanced forward only to for its blows to shatter on the Emperor's own shields, at which point the Master of Mankind unleashed a set of targeted witch-fires that severed Trazyn's hands, and then another set that severed his feet. Falling to his knees, feeling the Necrodermis starting to slowly heal itself, he merely gazed at a God that beheld him in wrath, raising a terrible sword that burned with flames.</p>
                    <p>The sword lanced out and a blast of Witch-flame seared the Necrodermis, cauterizing it. Trazyn's husk fell dead, the blast of Witch-Fire just sufficient to prevent his body-hopping by a narrow margin. With that, the Emperor sent a telepathic order across the Legions: <strong>+Fall back to your ships. We shall depart from there and unleash an Exterminatus upon this Tomb World.+ </strong>With that, the Iron Warriors and White Scars and Ultramarines, and the three Primarchs, made a withdrawal against a surprisingly punctured resistance.</p>
                    <p>As they withdrew into space, the Emperor's eyes glowed with the same golden hue that Perturabo had seen in his dreams and been warned about beginning to course through Holy Terra. His Power Claw splayed, the Emperor's gaze was followed by golden strands beginning to form a complex geometrical pattern across Solemnace. The claws closed and the light glowed and the planet splintered in space as though a terrible sieve had torn it.</p>
                    <p>Before the Emperor all knelt, save the Warmaster, who gazed at the destruction with a sense of déjà vu, before kneeling in turn. The Emperor gazed with dispassionate serenity. With the three Grey Knight Primarchs and his lost ones, he had six, now. Soon, Russ and Corax would return, and then finally the Lion would awaken.</p>
                    <p>An army rebuilt in loyalty to the Master of Mankind to rival that of his treasonous son. And the final battle for the Eye of Terror. Either the Eye would be destroyed or the visions he'd seen of ascending to become a God of Law, a force of fearsome power whose destructive nature remade Terra into a hellish paradise would ensue. It troubled the Emperor that the concept of an apotheosis that would remake Terra no longer bothered him.</p>
                    <p>
                      <strong>Armageddon:<br/></strong>
                    </p>
                    <p>Given the first honors of landing, Merihem understood instinctively, was no honor at all. Just more of his brothers trying to dispose of him and leave him for weakness. Bah. Iron was the true strength of existence. Iron, not merely within but without as well. His metallic teeth smiled as he saw his battle-brother, Oriax, rather calmer than he was.</p>
                    <p><strong>Worry not, brother</strong>. The flowing metallic sound of Merihem's voice gave shudders even to the rest of the Chaos band. <strong>I shall leave a few for you to scrounge. </strong></p>
                    <p>Oriax growled.</p>
                    <p>
                      <strong>There will be blood aplenty here. </strong>
                    </p>
                    <p>Merihem simply laughed as the ship they were in crashed into the surface, raising a tremendous column of smoke and ash.</p>
                    <p>The Iron Warriors on Armageddon, under command of the venerable Dantioch the Elder, approached with hesitation. If this was a true ship of the IV Legion it had been through very strange things. As they saw with a sudden horror drop-packs and a rain of Space Marines ensuing, the ship's door burst open.</p>
                    <p>Two monsters left, one to the right more of a thing of strange metal that gazed at them with hunger, forming its hand in a horrifyingly boneless fashion into chainsword-fingers, the one to the left a towering colossus at three meters in height and two meters across. This one formed its arms into meltaguns, and its strangely metallic melting slopping voice said:</p>
                    <p>
                      <strong>Iron Within, Iron Without. </strong>
                    </p>
                    <p>The Meltaguns opened fire without warning as the rest of the troops under the command of Warsmith Andraaz and Over-Captain Honsou suddenly made landfall…..</p>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Edited this chapter with things that are important to later ones.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. The History of the Imperium, War of the False Primarch I</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Among the many lengthy and brutal crises of the Imperium of Mankind in the ten thousand years from the time of the Horus Heresy to that of the Time of Ending and the onset of the Rhana Dandra, there are but a few that are the greatest. The War of the Beast, the Pale Wasting of M36, the onslaught of the Tyranid Hive Fleets, and others. Among the most controversial and the most bitterly fought was the so-called War of the False Primarch. Hidden deep within the archives of the Emperor and the Inquisition on Terra and in the most secret archives of Olympia in the Empire of Iron, the details remain. For most of the Imperium they are likewise mercifully obscure.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The following data are hidden in the most secretive and redacted files of the Ordo Malleus and the Emperor's Library on Terra, in several volumes of the Black Library guarded by the deity Cegorahch, and in the long narratives of the Library of War on Olympia, center of the Empire of Iron:</p><p>M33, Segmentum Pacificus:</p><p>"Commander," spoke Garviel Loken. "Shipmaster Comenus has found where we are, and when we are."</p><p>The commander nodded, his face shining.</p><p>"We are in Segmentum Pacificus. And....I do not think we are in our universe."</p><p>The other Mournival brothers stiffened and even Horus's fingers drummed.</p><p>"Why do you say that, my son?"</p><p>Garviel mused.</p><p>"Shipmaster Comnenus has told me that our heralds are greeted with an inveterate hostility, and not least by forces that are in numbers far too numerous to be realistic, and improbable in the triumph of the Emperor, beloved by all."</p><p>The last phrase echoed outward in a dutifully chorused sense.</p><p>"We seem to be at the edge of the Sabbat worlds, my lord."</p><p>It was then that there was a strange and eerie sound that disrupted the disquiet in the strategium. Of all his sons the commander knew that Garviel Loken was the best thinker, so he had made a point to have the thinking son make sense of the strangeness that faced them all. It confirmed a suspicion of his. Lost in another universe, and in another point of time. The result, and a strange and a curious one at that, of his triumph over the bloated thing that had been Eugan Temba and recognizing at last the nature of the blade in his hand and then personally finding the traitor Erebus and spitting him on his sword.</p><p>They had left the moon of Davin and then the Warp had lurched and shifted in that unlikely and curious sense and now they were here.</p><p>The noise was that of a hail, and Horus's response finally was to tell the Shipmaster, "My dear Boas, answer that hail." </p><p>"Yes, milord."</p><p>With that, the Hololith formed a figure, towering and hulking, and Horus's eyes at first widened and then narrowed. Barban Falk, one of his brother's Warsmiths from back in the day and one of the few among the Iron Warriors to gain Galactic-wide fame.</p><p>He leaned forward. "Warsmith Falk?"</p><p>
  <em>I am just the Warsmith. You, however, cannot be what you seem. Horus Lupercal, arch-traitor, is dead. He was slain on the bridge of his ship by my father using an experimental weapon derived from the effects of Blanks and of a rough duplicate of xenos tech. You are a phantom, and nothing more. </em>
</p><p>"What madness is this?" Horus's question was sharp and his wrath cutting. "Don't you recognize me? I am Horus Lupercal, Lord of the Sons of Horus! My father appointed me Warmaster at Ullanor, you were the captain of the Iron Warriors representing your legions on that world!" </p><p>
  <em>I remember the Horus of that time yes, phantom. He looked much as you do. And I remember the bloated war machine in armor corrupted by eldritch gods from another universe, the one who burned half the universe. His soul was destroyed by the Emperor, who spent a millennium in penance for the grief of destroying the son he loved most. The soul of Horus is gone, so you cannot be what you seem, nor can you be a Primarch in truth. Only one of the sons of the Emperor remains and my father is on Terra preparing for a new Crusade in the wake of the War of the Beast and repairing the ravages of the Beheading. </em>
</p><p>"None of this makes sense," </p><p>For a moment the so-called Warsmith sighed, a noise surprisingly human for such a colossus, who would tower over Abaddon and Torgaddon but still came up to the chest of a Primarch.</p><p><em>No, it does not. I want to believe an unstained Horus could return, but it is not a galaxy for hope any longer. No peace among the stars, only an eternity of slaughter and carnage, and the laughter of thirsting Gods. Return from whence you came, phantom, or be declared </em>Traitoris Excommunicadis.</p><p>"I will not obey orders from a son of one of my brothers, not without proof that he has authorized them." </p><p>
  <em>So be it. </em>
</p><p>Then the hololith changed and the sons of Horus and their full fleet, assembled in the wake of the Davin catastrophe and drawn not at Davin but near Cthonia itself, one last look at the Throneworld before the Warp-rift had devoured them all, encountered a thing that left them awed and trembling. An Iron Warriors fleet, gargantuan, with the stark unpainted metal bar brilliant yellow and black hazard stripes and with the skull motif of the IV Legion, had appeared near them. The flagship was in the center, and it was a ship to match a Gloriana-class starship, a fleet worthy of a Legion master. </p><p>"The entire IV Legion?" Horus Aximand's question was startled, and a measure of the unease the rest felt.</p><p>"Evidently, my son."</p><p>One last hail from the so-called Warsmith intruded.</p><p>
  <em>Even after all the Arch-Traitor has done, the power of the memory you simulate is enough that I cannot give a direct order to fire on something like the old Horus. I will communicate with my father. Turn back or remain here, and there will be no reason to fear tragedy. Defy these orders, False Primarch, and there will be blood shed on a scale that has not been seen since you laid waste to Terra. </em>
</p><p>Now it was Abaddon who snarled: "You dare insult our father this way? The Emperor himself made him Warmaster because he was superior at war to that oaf of a father of yours. A lord of war, not spades!" </p><p>The Warsmith's gaze turned to him.</p><p>
  <em>Very convincing, Warp-spawn. You sound like the Ezekyle Abaddon who used to be, not the self-proclaimed Warmaster who's led two Black Crusades already. The Warp is prone to deception in many ways. </em>
</p><p>Again communication shut out, and the 63rd, 90th, and 211th Expedition fleets, the cumulative weight of the entire Sons of Horus Legion as it was in the wake of the Battle of the Moon of Davin and before the Exterminatus that had annihilated the traitor-world, remained indecisive, waiting on the decision of the Warmaster. </p><p>"You were right, Garviel. Not in our time, and not in our universe. That...."</p><p>The commander steepled his gauntlet and power claw.</p><p>"This is another trick of the Warp, like that of the horde of the undead on that moon. They're not using the corpses of enslaved loyal sons of Terra this time, my sons. They're using the simulation of the most loyal and backbreakingly so Legion beyond our own, in all truth. Cunning, clever, but not enough."</p><p>He activated a vox link between all the expedition fleets, one of many perks of his new-found status as Warmaster, one that he was free to deploy for the first time, and in a situation of such dire necessity as justified it.</p><p>"My sons, it is with the deepest and the most profound regret that I give you this order. I order the Guns to fire, let the daemons burn!"</p><p>The Iron Warriors fleet, one of four such forces in the Imperium, and one that matched the strength of the old Legion together, was startled when the Sons of Horus fleet opened fire in a sudden and devastating set of generalship that was straight out of the old ways. The Sons of Horus flagship, not the Chaos-corrupted abomination wielded by the monstrously changed Ezekyle Abaddon but the old ship that had been known in the old days, took the van, its firepower breaking void shields and annihilating what Horus had already identified as a weak point in the Iron Warriors defenses.</p><p>It was war in the Cthonian sense, hard as a rock and hot as hell in the heart and against the sudden and dramatic demonstration of ship-steering skill that only the sons of the Khan could exceed, the Iron Warriors were so stunned at the sight of the Luna Wolves opening fire and proving, in the end, that it was a Warp trick after all that their carefully managed and rigid formation could not adapt in time to do more than destroy two Luna Wolves ships, leaving the other hundreds to break through and into the Sabbat Worlds. The Warp to their further discontent welcomed them smoothly, and it was not long after that the world of Hagla detected the warning signs of a vast fleet coming through the Empyrean, and there was dissent and turmoil that began to spread there, for reasons unknown. </p><p><br/>MANDEVILLE POINT, HAGIA SYSTEM: </p><p>Three Luna Wolves fleets and 100,000 Astartes, the Emperor's best, the unyielding iron speartip, manifested over the Shrine World. In M33, such was the success of the eradication of the memory of the Traitor Legions in a millennium that only the Inquisition agents on-world could have recognized the bone-white ships with the wolves painted, and the hulking ship that in its white hue and with the brilliant burning Eye of Terra appeared as it had in its glory days. The vast force had materialized out of nothing, as all ships did from the Warp. The Fleet had discovered the vox-transmissions of a sort that contradicted the Imperial Truth, and did so in a way that brought up bad memories of Lorgar Aurelian and his gang of God-Botherers mislabeled a Legion.</p><p>The first inkling that Hagla, which would become the center of the first major fighting of the War of the False Primarch, had of the arrival of the False Primarch, was when the drop pods began to fall.</p><p>The Iron Warriors were not friendly to the Imperial Creed, and in the duration of the Long War would never become friendly to it. It represented to them a vicious necessity imposed by the outcome of the Heresy and the Siege of Terra. And in this they were more friendly than quite a few Space Marine chapters. The Ecclesiarchy was a new bureaucracy led by the descendants of the servants of Malcador the Sigilite, fulfilling Malcador's explorations of the power of Faith, and the Emperor had given his own grudging assent to it as a tool. Among the elements that made it what it was was a kind of guarantee that none of its worlds would be at risk of onslaught from Astartes any more than any other Shrine world. </p><p>And yet, here clearly, there were drop pods falling from the sky. Here, clearly, there were Astartes doing the unthinkable.</p><p>The unwise and the foolish knelt, believing this to be the Angels of Death come to pay homage to the Saint and to honor the Emperor.</p><p>None knew the specific chapter of the Astartes that had these colors or that symbol, but all knew the sense of awe leavened with entirely grounded fear.</p><p>None knew the precise nature of the golden Thunderhawk that was descending with that same symbol, either, nor the nature of the berth given it.</p><p>It landed first, and from it stepped an improbable figure, splendid and wondrous, a tsunami that made landfall and brought crowds to their knees weeping tears of awe. He was bald and he was wondrous, a force of such charisma as could only be that of a son of the God of all humanity himself. By his side were four Angels of Death. Two were very tall, one wearing his helm and hidden behind the clanking beetle-element of his armor. The other was shaven save a topknot and unshaven, wearing a dark suit of Terminator armor and immensely tall and broad, far moreso than the other Legionaries. The other one with the helmet was taller but even in his vast armor he was thinner. The other two were likewise helmed, though the unsmiling demigod at their head was unhelmed and likewise said nothing. The pods fell and there was a rapt silence, a force of 50,000 Astartes lined up, a vast coffin-ship carrying the <em>Dies Irae </em>landing, along with other Titans of the Mechanicum. Even for the Warmaster's own it took six hours of rapt and tense silence for these forces to make planetfall, the combined-arms force of Astartes and their Titan allies forming a force that began, at last, to clearly show signs of being unfriendly.</p><p>Servo-skulls suddenly froze as a signal overrode that of the Shrine world.</p><p>"Citizens of Hagia, you are in violation of the Lex Imperialis. Worship of false gods is forbidden to citizens of the Imperium, and worship of the Lectitio Divinitatus, a credo espoused by the traitor Lorgar Aurelian and written in his own hand is especially forbidden. You have an hour to denounce your false creed, or you will be killed where you stand and your heathen temple shall be laid waste. So speaks Horus Lupercal, Warmaster of the Imperium and master of the Sons of Horus."</p><p>In M33, even with the erasure of the Traitor Legions, the name Horus had endured. From the brightest star of the 18, he had become a satanic force of devilry that had sought to lay Terra low with monstrous legions of things twisted into ruined mockeries of oth the human form and the glory of the angel of death. Shrine worlds taught of this Horus, and of his role in the changes the Imperium had undergone in the Scouring and the Time of Reforging.</p><p>What was also known was that the Warmaster of the Imperium did not go by the name of a devilry of legend and myth, but was the last living Son of the Emperor, Perturabo of Olympia, famously dour and even capable of a murderous rage.</p><p>It was one of the Ecclesiarchy's priests who shouted "Death to Daemons that besmirch the Warmaster!" After shouting this he raised a weapon, a lasgun of a large and a formidable nature, pointing it at the daemon that simulated what a son of the Emperor should be like. The gun would have fired if not for a single blast of a storm bolter held in the left gauntlet of the god's hand, the blast obliterating him in a shower of meat and bone.</p><p>"You have made your choice, it is the wrong one. Sons of Horus, illuminate them!" The last sentence was shouted and he holstered the storm bolter before raising Worldbreaker and leading the charge as the <em>Dies Irae </em>opened fire. Fifty thousand sons of Horus, just over half the Legion, against a Shrine world with areas of strong firepower and defenses but largely civilian. What fighting there was was largely bloodless but the massacre that followed, the sheer fury at the defilement of the Emperor's vision and the fanaticism of these Chaos worshipers who defiled his father's vision with his father's title on their lips and the pretense that they could somehow be loyal serving the idea of the God-Emperor amplifying it.</p><p>The scenes of horror, the pyramids of skulls and the blood that flowed to the bridle of horses for miles was worthy of the XII Legion lost to their Nails and to the terrible frenzies the Gladiator had encouraged in his bloody legion of savages. It was wrathful and it was ruinous, but it was as much an exorcism of the bitterness of Davin and of the terrible awakening that had come upon them as anything else. It was a brutality latent in Cthonia, an d one that even Garviel Loken, who had risen much more highly in the commander's favor since he alone had seen elements of the deeper truth of Davin and proven vindicated, in the end, even when the Warmaster had emerged victorious in the terrible duel there.</p><p>The rage finally passed and the Sons of Horus felt some guilt and shame for the brutality unleashed, but no regrets for massacring heathens that insulted the name of the Emperor and practiced that which was most abhorrent to him, the supposed belief in a God-Emperor of Mankind.</p><p>Hagia had fallen in six hours of butchery.</p><p>Due to the elaborate and redundant information protocols of the Iron Warriors, news of the battle on the outskirts of the Shabbat worlds and the Sacking of Hagia by the false Primarch made their way to Olympia and to the vast networks around Holy Terra itself.</p><p>It took the Emperor very little time to send the orders to draw up forces to take the Imperator Somnium itself under his personal command to the Shabbat Worlds, which in the wake of the Sacking of Hagia were swift to declare loyalty to the False Primarch. Even as the Emperor sent the orders and the Warmaster, as was the reality of Imperial Law and an old thing Horus himself had taken for granted but Perturabo of Olympia would never bring himself to do, obeyed them and brought with him his own fleet, a Legion-strong force of the most veteran and effective Iron Warriors meant as the Imperium's Hammer, sons of Hagia were beginning the process to be fast-tracked to swell and augment the ranks of the Sons of Horus, while defenses in space and on the hundred worlds of Shabbat were wrought into a war zone of terrible ferocity.</p><p>In an Empire of the proverbial million worlds (and in truth much larger than that in the wake of the conquests that had followed the Heresy and the War of the Beast, and before the Heresy as well), a mere hundred defecting did not mean much, on the surface. When a False Primarch who seemed an uncanny thing of the Dark Gods themselves wearing the face of the old Horus Lupercal and with his entire Legion at his disposal orchestrated this defection and had, due to the will of the Warp, a year and a half to forge his defenses, it proved to mean a very great deal, as from the Shabbat sector his forces had orchestrated multiple speartip strikes that brought half of Segmentum Pacificus within the control of the False Primarch within that span of time.</p><p>The Emperor and his 300 Custodes and a full-strength battalion of Grey Knights, and one hundred thousand of the most elite of the Iron Warriors under the personal command of the Warmaster himself, both backed up by vast Legions of Titans, against the 100,000 0f the Sons of Horus. The Galaxy would find the ensuing trial one of the more severe ones the Imperium faced, and one that would haunt the Emperor and Perturabo both in different, perhaps irreconcilable, ways.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Psychic Awakening Part I:</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The Emperor begins to fulfill an old project as he prepares his next move, a great strike into the Maelstrom.  Another of the Lost Sons awakens.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>THE IMPERIAL PALACE, THE SILENT WING:</p><p>In the immense and sprawling region that Perturabo had rebuilt so long ago, there remained a few beings who were retained as artifacts, and even potential doomsday weapons. It was partially a trophy hall, for here was the still-preserved Armor of Pearl of Kalagann of Ursh, a name long forgotten in the ten thousand years of the Long War and the Emperor's direct and active presence in Holy Terra. Here too was a being of immense power, the elder brother of all the Primarchs, kept not in stasis but in an Emperor-induced slumber behind wards so powerful that even a fully enraged and wrathful Magnus the Red with the full aid of all four of the Powers could not have cracked them. Just to his right was a body that alone among the Primarchs, Perturabo of Olympia was familiar with, a body that disclosed an ancient secret and a strange reason that explained why alone among all his brothers, Magnus and he had become such friends when so much else was different between the proud mystic and the volcanic lord of the Empire of Iron.</p><p>
  <em>The Imperial Palace, a decade after the Siege of Terra: </em>
</p><p>
  <em>It was some sixty years before the last confrontation between Perturabo and he whom Perturabo had once called brother, then a set of increasingly scatological and profane imprecations, then simply Traitor. He remained on Terra as Praetorian, setting to rights the damage on the Palace. For a rare change he sought to blend a vast and overpowering set of interlocking defenses, many non-euclidean and geared with hidden elements of psionic crystals and machinery riffed from the designs of fallen Prospero with a wondrous beauty to dwarf the elder Palace before the terrible Siege. Others of his brothers waged the bitter war, the Lion had vanished and no news of him was known. Corax, too, lost into the Warp with only the word 'Nevermore' on his lips. His father had raised an eyebrow and pinched his nose, a gesture strange to Perturabo and reflecting something that was lost to him. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>So much was lost and could never be returned nor restored. Russ, the Lion, Roboute, Vulkan. Those who fought and led wars among the stars to ensure the last traces of the Traitors were routed. Half the Imperium had fallen to Horus in seven years, when he had become mad and boosted by the dark powers he had grasped to his bosom before they had failed him in the end in a hail of bolter rounds. Now Perturabo was walking as his sons went to work to fulfill one of his dreams exactly as he'd hoped. Ever since his father, in the earliest days of the Heresy, had spoken to him of the Hidden War in the time when he had found himself moored on the throne as he bent his power to sealing a terrible rip in a hidden path that was superior to the old Warp-paths, he had had the power of the Eye removed. A thing that had endured even the period when an inspection of the outer defenses had seen him ensnared by an athame and the Bearers of the Word into the Eye itself and the planet Hydra Cordatus. An ordeal that had left its mark and a terrible wound in his soul, one his father had seen fit to heal when Horus made plantefall and which had humbled him. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>He could exist, now, bereft of the terrible thing that had gazed into him at all times and his eye for sifting labyrinths and secret things in that kind of mathematical pattern had only increased, not decreased. It was why alone among his brothers he had discovered the things hidden beyond the traces of Kalagann of Ursh and other techno-barbarian foes. There were beings frozen here in stasis. One in particular was stranger than others. A being that was frozen in the stasis clad in what seemed to be a black dress with an avian hood, long black hair trailing past her shoulders. Her eyes were a violet to match Fulgrim's as the eyes of the Phoenician had been. He had asked his father what that being was the first time he had seen her then and all his father had said was that she was a 'Gem' for the 'Seven Hammers' and a part of ensuring that the Ultimate Sanction would work if it needed to. And then said nothing else. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She was powerful, even in the stasis, and he felt a sense of power that was curious and inconsistent, at the one hand a kind and loving one that he could not quite place the nature of that energy nor why those emotions over others. And at the other, a deep and malevolent force that lurked in those eyes, with wrath and power that was not of the Warp and yet very, very real. He knew, somehow, that whatever this was was no thing of the Warp and yet it felt....daemonic. A problem, an inconsistency. It did not help that this had been part of what had followed the incident of the dreadful elements of the Rangdan Xenocide, when an eldritch force of unknown nature had appeared in the Ghoul Stars and scourged from there parts of the Imperium with fire until his father had unleashed...something. It had been around that time that Malevolion's Legion had encountered that same force and been obliterated to a man speaking only a single name over and over again. Corvus. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>That wasn't what had drawn his attention. This was. It was something that had not been here before, in this vast realm of trophies that reflected his father's victories across the span of a long lifetime. One of them was a skull, worked in clay with seashells for eyes and marked only 'Pater' in a proto-Gothic tongue. There was a being entrapped in a labyrinth with a name that had four letters, a being of brilliant hue that burned his eyes to see, not the elder brother of which he had learned as one of the weapons of last resort, but another thing. Four letters, in an ancient and unknown tongue. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>There were many things in this that he had no context for, a robot tall and menacing that was built in a massive sense with glowering red eyes. His father had mentioned that this was nothing that had actually existed, merely a memento of M2 and one of his favorite kinds of old stories, though it was something eeriely convincing. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>And then there was this. A woman's body in something in between coffin and stasis field. She was rangy and pale with long black hair, her eyes closed and her hands clasped around something very, very odd. A book in an ancient Proto-Nordyc tongue. 'Hans Christian Andersen,' Perturabo had read, his gift for tongues meaning it was no great task to decipher. A strange name, very very old Nordyc, but why this? A book that look like a children's book and a woman who was dead yet in a stasis field? He had looked at her and then whirled around when his Father materialized behind him. </em>
</p><p>
  <em><strong>++My son,</strong> he had spoken, <strong>it is time that I tell you of a secret that is one of the ones I held closest. You shall come to understand why, in the end, and when, not if, all of your brothers are united, there shall be a greater understanding and then you shall all know.++</strong></em>
</p><p>
  <em>It was then that his father had placed his hand on the edge of the stasis field's generator, stroking it with the affection he would display ten thousand years later on Solemnace. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++I am sorry, Alivia. You wanted it to end, but I cannot let it. You and I are the last, bar Thawn, and Thawn is too lost to the Astartes now to ever truly.....++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>He had fallen silent. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>My son, his glowing eyes turned to Perturabo. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>"Yes, father?" </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++You, all of you, are truly my sons. You are, as you have been told by me in full, now that there is no further point to denying it and now that you have seen what its power unchecked has done to your brothers, at least partially the power of the Warp. Twenty of  humanity's old Gods bound in mortal flesh. In you, my son,  there are the spirits of Svartalfar of Nidavellir, marvelous masters of the forge, and other entities besides. To contain that power it required beings of extraordinary nature, of whom there are now but three in the Galaxy alive, well, functional. Anval Thawn, the youngest of us, the first new one of us born and already recruited into the Grey Knights.++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Your brother Vulkan....and myself. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>His eyes turned to the woman and Perturabo's gaze was drawn much more closely to her. </em>
</p><p>
  <em><strong>++There are two women who.....served...as mothers to the Primarchs. One of them was also the mother to your older brother, he who banished the Crimson King and the Phoenician in the most terrible days of the Siege.++</strong> </em>
</p><p>
  <em> For a moment the Emperor paused. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++And she is your mother and Magnus's, my son. The other eighteen had Erda, one of my.....old acquaintances, as a mother. An experiment, you understand. Initially there were meant to be equal numbers of each but sabotage and the malice of the Warp meant only two of you were brought to fruition. Both of whom are children of knowledge and of learning and of the wonders of books. The Sorcerer and the Architect.++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perturabo stared in sudden bemusement. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>"So I did have a mother after all?" </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Emperor nodded. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++You all did. Most of you are scions of another Perpetual, now long lost with nothing left. She.....Alivia knew nothing of you or of Magnus as her biological offspring, though Magnus, in the end, found out in the worst possible way.++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perturabo winced. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>"So she's the Saint who sacrificed herself for the Throne, then." </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++Yes, Saint Alivia of the Knife. When she.......gave birth to the Angel, it damaged her heavily, leaving her sterile, or so she believed. Yet I took from her a few of her.....I took what can make a child. I intended it as a gift but she awoke sooner than I expected and saw the blood and the results and came to the wrong conclusion. </strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>And yet, in the end, after tens of thousands of years of at the best case fractious relations between us, she came to my side at the Siege, and she fought Magnus the Red, seeking to buy Vulkan time to reach the Throne. He killed her, in the end. For all her power, she could not match mine, and could not match his. He was angry and he shattered her soul, leaving her......there. Vulkan interned her in the field, and I intend to find her soul-shards and to restore her. I could not do this for Magnus, he spurned me in the end.++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>He sighed. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++He found out that she was his mother as she is yours, Perturabo, and found that out only when he shattered her soul and there was that sudden moment of seeing that kinship. A foolish gamble on my part, that he would see his mother and his wrath would dim and then we could talk. The only greater error I made was to presume that the nature of the Neverborn meant that their princes could not work together to achieve a common aim or to achieve a common result.++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Emperor looked at her, quietly. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++You and Magnus are among the most precious to me of any of my sons save he who is now damnatio memoriae, because you were her only two. She is Rachel once more, mother to two sons who received the least honor in certain ways and yet whose traces endure the most. One for ill, one for good.++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em><strong>++I couldn't save your brother, but I will save her whether or not she thanks me for it. I have failed in so many things, my son, that I refuse to allow this one to remain.++</strong> </em>
</p><p>
  <em>"Why, father? You said that she did not welcome you in life. Why would she welcome you if she returned?" </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>++I don't care if she does, my son. I have taken so many lives, I do not think it too much to ask to restore one. This is one project that shall become part of my own quests, and there will be times where you must be regent on Terra in the short term in my stead as I pursue it. And...I have others. It will be a long time by mortal standards and even by those of a Perpetual or an Immortal, but you will see them in full.++</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>And with that his father was gone, and the Lord of Iron stood quietly, his hands crossed in front of his waist, clad in iron-hued duty robes of chainmail, lost in thought, head reeling with the revelation and the  explanation of the stasis-casket he had seen Vulkan bearing in private after the horrific breach of security by Magnus in spite of what he had thought were ironclad precautions against it. That....and the tears in his father's eyes, a thing that he had never sought to see and had found strangely disturbing more than serenity would have been. </em>
</p><p><em>After that, from time to time whenever he was on Terra, Perturabo had gone here, and had begun to speak to the silent and soulless body that remained in stasis, telling her stories and letting the facade of the stoic and wrathful and petulant persona he wore crack</em>.</p><p>THE SILENT WING, M41:</p><p>Roboute was dead now, the Emperor mused. One of his sons, and one closest in spirit of any save Perturabo, now, of the ones left. Fallen in the wake of his own time in stasis. He had never truly died and the madness of endless existence in that hell had overwhelmed him. Now....he had forty-eight such wraiths, all of the shards so painstakingly and often painfully collected over ten thousand years. The last three in Solemnace, next to one of his imprisoned sons. Magnus had shattered her soul into forty-eight shards, many more than had been so with his own when Russ had smote him in two over his knee on Prospero.</p><p>His powers had grown immensely since those days, ten thousand years ago, and then he was, without false modesty, the only being in the material world to rival the old Star Gods at their height in the days before the Dinosauria had gone extinct. Now....empowered by tens of thousands of years of worship and battle-sacrifice, the Emperor's eyes glowed and his power that expanded into the sphere of the human afterlife began to work. One by one the shards merged as the Stasis field deactivated. It was more of an expensive pretense to avoid the prospect of an undecaying corpse in a Palace that would draw unwelcome eyes, among them those of the Ruinous Powers and in particular the Thousand Sons.</p><p>One by one they merged until a soul formed that in three dimensions had a much brighter burn than most human souls, the kind of brightness that long-dead Erda, John, Damon, and Olliver had once shared with him. And in time, it was a long and crawling thing much like his own, though the nature of the fires differed. The eyes of the soul congealed with the last of the merger and before the soul could focus on what, if anything, held it aslumber, the soul was drawn into the body again.</p><p>In the coffin the corpse took a sudden rasping breath and her eyes opened, and then a scream that had been choked off in Psy-Flame echoed with a terrible shrieking sound.</p><p>Even as he remained there, waiting, the Emperor knew that his sons were at work preparing the next strike. One into the Maelstrom, where his next phase of a plan would begin to see if what he had done to the storm he had conjured at one point against a particularly dangerous Ork WAAAGGGH!! in the aftermath of his neglect during the War of the Beast could be done on a greater scale. His sons believed it to be so simple a thing as an overt war, but it would be more than that. They would have the chance to hone blades against the Traitors. He would seek no less than the direct sealing of the Maelstrom. The afterbirth of the emergence of Slaanesh could not be contained, but if storms on the scale of the Maelstrom could be, and the Legions there denied ingress into the material world.....</p><p>He had the Khan, the Architect, and the Forgemaster preparing with the twin Psyker Primarchs, a more successful experiment on the Apharius-Omegon model, a great strike against the Legions. Legions there would be, but there were other threats in the heart of the Warp, and it would be at one remove a fascinating exercise to see how they would react when that one made its first appearance here.</p><p>IMPERIAL WAR-ROOM:</p><p>"It does seem strange that our father prepares to wage war on the Maelstrom with such a relatively puny fleet. Your Legion in ten thousand years, brother, has grown to five times the size of a Legion of the old Crusade."</p><p>Perturabo nodded. "A reserve Legion, my own elite, and three Legions each for my Triarchs."</p><p>"I understand the principle, brother," chided Vulkan fairly gently.</p><p>"That is what I am getting at. You command so vast a force as this and yet you are asked to send a quarter of your  Legion, while we command multiple successor chapters or..." and he sighed for a moment in sadness, "a chapter that so long removed from Istvaan is all that remains of our own Legions. There are five of us, against a single Warp storm. Even with this Huron Blackheart as one of the many aspiring Mini-Horuses, there seems to be a disproportionate force here. As mighty as we are, we cannot possibly hope to do more than fight the Traitor Legionaries."</p><p>"You should read more in those briefings, brother," said Perturabo with a surprising affability, the Lord of Iron relieved that his own brothers had returned at last to share the old burdens. "Our father's plan seems straightforward to me. The cultivation of peace and its energies can only do so much against the immaterium when the Orks and their path of endless war has a greater psychic imprint, but it does enough. Add to that our father's power and as with a few of the minor storms that came and went in your time, the first of the great ones might be sealed. The Legionaries would go from where their demonic monsters meet the realm of mortality to that realm itself in the raw." </p><p>They shared grim smiles, all of them well familiar with just how pleasant the eldritch horrors that lurked beyond the walls of the world would be.</p><p>"Our role, as you put it, is precisely that. We will challenge the Traitor Legionaries, and draw them out. When they seek the honor, such that they think they can achieve, of slaying Primarchs, they will leave the true goal present for our father, and for his great scheme. Beyond this, brothers, the traitor Kor Phaeron is located in that dimension. His knife, as well as that of brother Fulgrim, killed our brother Roboute, in the end. He could not, in the stasis field, overcome what they did to him." </p><p>Their gaze became first somber, then wrathful.</p><p>Perturabo's voice became cold and laden with the unconstrained bloodthirst and malice they were all familiar with from his career in the crusade. "The so-called Dark Apostle would not be able to constrain himself in facing four of us, and in particular in facing me. The followers of the Ruinous Powers still hold to the idea that because a daemon showed them that I was one of their supposed chosen that it is my fate to fall."</p><p>His wrath became a smile and it was the most terrifying thing his brother-Primarchs had seen. A brutally rugged giant whose bulk was even more intimidating than that of Ferrus Manus and with a face that was most naturally dour if not in a frothing and terrifying rage to match that of Angron at points giving a reptilian smile that made Primarchs, sons of the Emperor meant to bestride a Galaxy, shiver in genuine and truthful fear.</p><p>"Let him. He has  more than earned his death, and my allies among the Sisters of Silence will make it so."</p><p>THE ROCK, RUINS OF THE OLD CALIBAN:</p><p>At the same time as what had been an undecaying corpse in the realm of the Silent Wing of the Imperial Palace awoke with a scream, two incidents unfolded in the heart of the Rock. In the first case, a being of ancient years who remained curiously preserved, if more than slightly mad and now thickly bearded where once he had been cleanshaven, found himself able to once more call upon the powers that had reshaped and reforged him. He had use them to strike down the being he had once seen as a son, the being whom he could have slain twice-over and yet both times in the end when it had fallen to him to do so, he had failed. With the power of the Four he giggled "By power of eight and might of four, let the way be opened" and then a sudden bass sound rasping with giggling laughter and eerie screaming echoed in his cell as a hellish red light gleamed. Donning his helm, Luther, once master of the Fallen and briefly a lord of worlds until the bitter war with the Lion, slipped in.</p><p>After all those years, he was free. Free.</p><p>He would send a call, drawing with him all that had endured of his servants since the men from the future had come and brought ruin to Caliban. Even if after ten thousand years in mortal time it were merely a half-Legion, it would be Dark Angels, sons of Caliban. The First, and the eldest, and the mightiest. A force sufficient to conquer a Galaxy by itself. Abaddon the Despoiler had fallen in favor with the Four since his first true failure, and the Powers were now calling to the Daemon Primarchs. Alone among the Loyalists, the Lion did not need the Emperor to tell him of the truth of what lurked within the Warp. He knew, and he had always known. The Tuchulcha Engine, the Oroborous, and the Plagueheart had shown him that.</p><p>From them, too, in his deep slumber he had learned more than anyone, even the Emperor, of the War in Heaven. Alone among the beings of the Galaxy since its fall, from the very most powerful Warp-entities that they had made, he knew the truth of the Emperor, of his weapons status and who had forged him. Of the Old Ones, of what they were and where they had gone.</p><p>So he had known fully what he was up against when he had faced Luther then, and if not for the men from the future intervening Luther would have been obliterated and he knew it. The Lion would have destroyed him. Yet it was this that left him with the expectation that he could be forgiven as soon as the Lion awoke. And not just him, all of the Fallen.</p><p>A cell over from Luther, a long-slumbering entity lay, a force of nature wrought into a gigantic human form with immense power, one who had learned the deep secrets and ancient lore from entities, even a servant of Nurgle who had uniquely among his daemons due to the wards placed on and around him by the Old Ones, been sundered from his master. Alone among daemons save that of Khorne it and the Oroborous did not lie, not anymore. The fall of Caliban had freed them and they could not go back. He knew the deep secrets, the bitter and horrid truth that underlaid the heart of existence. More to the point, he knew with a sick horror exactly why his father had forbidden the Imperial Creed and of the Imperial Creed, and the time bomb now ticking in the heart of the Earth.</p><p>Ten thousand years he had slumbered and become who he was now.</p><p>In that cell the Lion's eyes opened and he stared at the ceiling, and then he felt his body. Clad in robes, robes that were surprisingly in good condition after so long a rest. He looked to the small figure clad in the robe with a face only he could see and he heard its voice and the greasy feeling of the Warp was in it, but he knew that these Watchers were the ones of their kind loyal to him, if not necessarily to humanity.</p><p>He nodded. The message was heard, and it was understood.</p><p>He got up, amazed again that after ten thousand years of slumber, somehow, his muscles had not atrophied. His father had worked wonders blending Warp and flesh, though he suspected here it was whatever made the Emperor anathema that made it so. And the duality and tension between them that made Primarchs what they were, and their sons what they were. He strode to the door of his cell and paused. His hand reached for the doorknob and the door opened easily. The Lion mused, if his sons knew he was not dead, they would want to check up on him and it's not like the eternally slumbering would rise often, nor that a door would slow him down, let alone stop him.</p><p>When the door opened he looked out and none other than Azrael, chapter master of the Dark Angels, knelt before his father, whose awakening had disrupted his attempt to decipher just what the sudden Warp-spasm in Luther's cell meant, dreading that prospect. He could not help it, nor the rest of the Angels. Their father lived, and he was awake. </p><p>His voice echoed with a tectonic rumble:</p><p>"Little brothers...."</p><p>BAAL ORBITS:</p><p>The first inkling that the Blood Angels had of the strangeness that was to come to upon them was when a vast and splendid Necron ship materialized out of nowhere near the orbit of Baal. The Necrons, those most ancient and strange of the xenos, were not a foe that the sons of the Angel had faced often, yet here they were, and here they would be.</p><p>A voice echoed across the comms of Baal, easily hacking the Imperium's vox-transmissions.</p><p>
  <em>Sons of the Angel, on behalf of our master the Silent King Szarekh, Lord of the Necronytr, we bring you greetings. </em>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. The chronology of the Storm of Iron-verse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A broad chronology of the timeline from the Age of Mythology to the Last Age.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em>This Chronology is complied from secret data taken from my father's observations written in his own hand and shown to me in secret conversations following the Scouring, and from various studies and observations corroborated by data taken from other universes. The tremors and the golden spiderwebbing in Terra are accelerating, and much may be lost forever, never to be remembered. Thus, these records, written and compiled on Terra itself and during more idle times in the War of the Maelstrom</em>.-Perturabo, Warmaster of the Imperium, Lord of the Empire of Iron.</p><p>The Age of Mythology-A.M. 10-M 1:</p><p>In this period it is said that a group of living immortals, possibly powerful Psykers or another kind of product of Warp-spawned influenced ruled over the first Golden Age of humanity and the Sol System. Ruled from Luna, this Golden Kingdom was consolidated by a powerful Matriarch, held to be the distant progenitor of the Selenar Cult and interwoven in the myth cycles of the Rabbit of the Moon and the Golden Knight. This first Matriarch was a warlike and a bloody sort and hammered into being a kingdom enforced by a matriarchal system. Savants in the Imperium believe this myth, as with the myth of the Crystal Empire ruled from the Dragon Kingdoms, marks a reaction against the hypermasculine leadership system of the Imperium.</p><p>This system ruled for a Golden and a Silver Age, both of which were nominally pacific and a Council of Nine oversaw the system of government in this age. The Inquisition believes that this indicates a tie to one of the Ruinous Powers whose names dare not be uttered aloud, and that the magical power displayed by this caste of mystics reflects that same tie. Ultimately this mystical age, as with the Imperium, fell to a ruinous civil war orchestrated by a madwoman from Terra, a shadow-archetype of the Silver Queen. In fire and fury the First Solar Empire fell, and in the wake of the cataclysm humanity was regressed to Stone Age life while the first and eldest civilizations, marked by the derelict and ruined castles with Machine Spirits that have an uncanny feminine shape and resonance to these legends, and mark the greatest proof that there is some truth to this idea of mythology as having some basis in empirical fact. These so-called Guardians played a major, if unsung, role in handicapping the efforts of the Traitor Legions to take Terra in the drive to the Siege and increased the time pressure that made their failure inevitable.</p><p>Humanity recouped the losses and regained the basis of a technological civilization in its wake, while this first, perhaps legendary Chaos incursion under a shadowy figure associated with the Sun who inspired the ur-Everchosen, the Gem-Queen, failed.</p><p>Age of Terra, M1-18:</p><p>In the last years of M1, the supposed legends of the Age of Mythology were confirmed, after a fashion, when an apocalyptic First Contact brought a powerful Xenos Psyker to Earth, marked its first tentative steps into the directions of the Age of Technology, and brought two instances where the Earth was depopulated and mass-resurrected by one of the founding leaders of the new Crystal Empire. This contact endures in legends into the present, along with the mythological cycle of a Rabbit of the Moon, a powerful mage who had a connection to ancient myths of Merica and the Dragon Nations concerning the shapes of the Seas of Luna. The Crystal Empire arose in the middle of M2 following a sudden Deep Freeze, and it established the basis of colonization and expansion through Segmentum Solar. The second and first historically confirmed Everchosen of Chaos, the Witch-Queen of Galactica, went on a multi-galactic rampage waging a series of Xenocides that depopulated entire worlds and did much, inadvertently, to expand the basis of humanity's expansion from Segmentum Solar and the rise of federations to the next step.</p><p>In M18 a group of scientists developed both the basis of later ships, the extension from the so-called Guardian Castles of the various planets of Segmentum Solar of the first crude AIs that would evolve into the Men of Stone and the Men of Iron, and the first of the Men of Gold, among whom can be seen in the form of the Stormlord a figure recognizably the Master of Mankind, blessed be he, and the ancient one who was with him then, the Saint of Molech. In the last years of M18, the Warp Drive was fully perfected and with it the Geller Field, as Navigators and Astropaths arose and with them the very first proven Psykers.</p><p>Age of Technology, M19-25:</p><p>For this too short a span of time in years humanity reached its apogee, an era of technology that even at its height in the Age of Power the Imperium of Mankind has never been able to match. Over these ten thousand years, the Men of Gold and Men of Stone prevailed across humanity's Federations as a unifying elite class, the figure known as the Stormlord the Supreme Commander of the unified Army of Mankind. It was an age of glory that can but be dimly grasped, when humanity's technology was equal to the Aeldari at their height and the xenos species known as the Necrons in theirs. Psykers grew and proliferated, humanity settled the Galaxy, forming alliances with various Xenos blocs. The incursion of the proto-Krork WWAAGGGHHH!!! Skragjaw and its attack on Ancient Terra repulsed by a group of heroes, among whom can be glimpsed the Emperor, the Perpetual John Grammaticus before his suborning by the Xenos Cabal, and the future Saint of Molech and its bitterness was the first true Xenos War, as opposed to the smaller incursions repelled by the legendary leaders of humanity's first rulers on the Crystal Throne.</p><p>The world that was here will never truly be again, and yet in the end, humanity's apex fell to the second great Chaos incursion to target humanity directly. The second Everchosen, the A.I. Overmind, declared humanity a threat to the future and believed the only way to preserve the Galaxy from Chaos was to exterminate humanity. The Chaos-corrupted Men of Iron ultimately were beaten by the largest inter-species leagues since the War in Heaven, but the price of this was that humanity began a long and slow and bitter slide into a terrible and a bloody age.</p><p>Old Night/Age of Strife, M25-29:</p><p>Psykers, who grew steadily through the Age of Technology, undergo a lightning proliferation in the first years of M25, as the Cybernetic Revolt winds down. The Federation of Terra, unified by the old Crystal Empire collapses as the ruling dynasty disappears for reasons unknown, only the First Saint, Cosmos, left as a last relic of this earlier age. For four thousand years humanity's worlds are isolated, falling into rule by warlords of mechanical or Chaos nature, or occupation by various Xenos lords. Humanity's system of government undergoes a slow and inexorable decay on Terra through a sequence of bitter Wars of Succession under the Heavenly Kingdoms, until anarchy reaches its peak in the rise of the great and terrible warlords of the age of Unity like Kalagann of Ursh, Dalmoth Kym of Hy-Brasil, Narthan Dume of the Pan-Pacific Empire, the Witch-King of Maulland Send, and other such states. Humanity nears its peak of potential extinction.</p><p>In M29, the Fall of the Eldar births the Eye of Terror and clears the Warp storms of the Age of Strife, while marking the ascension of the youngest of the Ruinous Powers, whose names are not to be spoken aloud. With it vanishes the hitherto-mightiest of the Galaxy's power and the Eldar rise in place of the Aeldari, divided between the shadowy reavers of the Webway, the fractured cultures of the Craftworlds, and the Exodites. The first true clashes of humanity and the sundered heirs of the old Aeldari begin in this era, and it is believed, though not proven, that Chogoris, Nuceria, and Colchis saw especially strong clashes that contributed to the decay of the old machine civilizations, while Nocturne became the first of the Webway Drukhari targets for preferred raids of many. </p><p>Some of the greatest of the old worlds of the Age of Technology, Colchis, Nuceria, Molech (home of the REDACTED of the REDACTED Legion), and Cthonia, sink into the kind of hellscapes that ultimately produced some of the most dangerous Traitor Primarchs. Other worlds that underwent similar transitions such as Medusa, Baal, Olympia, and Caliban, did not produce similar results. In particular Caliban, where some of the most powerful Chaos patterns of any world known to join the Imperium in the Age of Strife, produced one of the most loyal Primarchs, though REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.</p><p>Various federations rise in this era, among the more powerful the Oleanic Quietude, the Interex, the Star Empire of Dulan, the Diasporex, and Ork Empires of the kind like that purged in the Wheel of Fire. Among the most dangerous of which was the Rangdan Empire, targeted in the three Rangdan Xenocides that ended the REDACTED and brought the Dark Angels to a lower toll of manpower than the Iron Warriors, Ultramarines, or Word Bearers.</p><p>Dawn of the Imperium, M29-M31:</p><p>Beginning in the Unity the Imperium of Terra defeats all rivals, imposing the first unified rule on first Terra and then, in the wake of the Pacification of Luna and the overthrow of the last Matriarch of the Selenar, Serenity XVII, establishing the twenty Astartes Legions to conquer the Galaxy. In a span of just over two hundred years, the Galaxy sees the rise of the Imperium in the Great Crusade. Great wars are fought in this era, the Wheel of Fire, the Rangdan Xenocide, the Hrud Cull, culminating in the fall to Chaos of the first Warmaster of the Imperium, the accursed Horus Lupercal on the planet of Davin. The next ten years of the Heresy see a civil war that halves the Imperium's population in vast and terrible battles such as Isstvan V, Phall, Tallarn, Beta-Garmon, and the Siege of Terra itself. The first Chaos Warmaster, and its third Everchosen, Horus Lupercal, is gunned down by the future third Warmaster of the Imperium, Perturabo, on the Vengeful Spirit. </p><p>In the Great Scouring that follows the Traitor Legions are driven back to the Eye of Terra, their homeworlds laid waste, and the Primarch knnown as the Lion disappears after inexplicable temporal anomalies around the planet Caliban.</p><p>The Heresy witnessed the dawn of betrayal at Isstvan, the heroism of the Primarchs Jaghatai Khan and Leman Russ, who accounted for much of the decade lapse between the Dropsite Massacre and the arrival of Horus Lupercal on Terra. Rumors of REDACTED beneath the Palace on Terra and REDACTED mean that claims of incidents in the Imperial Dungeon are greatly exaggerated. Ultimately for all their strength, the loyal Primarchs could not hold the Everchosen from his goal of laying Siege to Terra, and in just over a year and a half the Siege brought the Traitors to such a point of desperation that Horus Lupercal bereft of the REDACTED from the great victory of Imperial arms on the Saturnine Wall marked the desperate gambit that brought all Primarchs on Terra save the Khan, who commanded the armies at the Palace during the attack on the Vengeful Spirit.</p><p>Of all humanity's wars, this decade did more to determine the course of Imperial history than any other.</p><p>The Forging, M31-2:</p><p>In the wake of the Scouring the Imperium rebuilds and reconstructs itself. The Iron Warriors begin their expansion to a legion five times the size of the largest Heresy-era Legions with their unique command structure, and the other chapters of the First and Second Foundings adjust to the new realities. All the remaining Primarchs save the future Warmaster Perturabo vanish during the War of the Beast, and the Beheading that follows sees the Emperor re-emerge from seclusion and establish direct rule over the Imperium. Following the ascension of Perturabo and his succession to Guilliman as the Warmaster of the Imperium, the Imperium is restructured. The Tetrarchy of Ultramar expands from the original 500 worlds to command the entire Ultima Segmentum, as a concession to the Ultramarines and their successor chapters, enabling one of the Galaxy's most successful sectors to begin its expansion and the new wars there expand the Imperium's territory by a conquest as vast as the Great Crusade's.</p><p>The rise of the Ecclesiarchy, the Inquisition, the Deathwatch, and the various Ordos of the Inquisition that focus on threats from the Ruinous Powers and Xenos and have their associated Space Marine factions, the REDACTED and the Deathwatch, all dates to this time. The new Council of Terra arrives at an understanding with Warmaster Perturabo following his restoration of civilian rule in the overthrowing of Vangorovich in a vicious duel in the Imperial Palace, that save when directly overriden by the Emperor, the Warmaster of the Imperum is the Emperor in all but name.</p><p>The Imperium is restructured in this era to its current administrative setup, a Segmentum Solar, a Segmentum Ferrae, ruled by the Iron Warriors and linked by garrisons and recruiting worlds rather than a more traditional structure, the Segmentum Ultramar, the Segmentum Obscurus, and the Segmentum Militates, near the Eye of Terror. The first Black Crusades under the Fourth Everchosen, Ezekyle Abaddon, begin during this era.</p><p>Too, along with the War of the Beast, the first stages of the rise of the Q'Orl Swarm-state marked a pattern that would see the Imperium focusing on consolidating its structures and dismissing the Q'Orl as a threat to safely ignore. </p><p>The Time of Power, M32-6:</p><p>In this era, the Imperium of Mankind reached its apex, becoming indisputably the master of a vast area of the Galaxy. Out of 100,000 light years, 70,000 total were conquered by the Imperium, which grew and became an ever more consolidated totalitarian state. Various Chaos incursions erupted of increasing severity, the various Black Crusades of the Despoiler, the defection of various smaller bands of Astartes, among the worst.</p><p>The next great war of the Imperium was the War of the False Primarch in M33, where a being that seemed akin to REDACTED manifested in the Materium and drew to himself vast legions of forces and occupied a hundred worlds. In a bitter century of struggle, no less than the Emperor himself and the Warmaster of the Imperium ultimately drove the REDACTED out of the Imperium, and five chapters of Astartes were deemed Ex Traitoris, and hunted down and destroyed due to REDACTED REDACTED.</p><p>The Ecclesiarchy, which the Emperor came to see as marking precisely the sort of force he'd warned against in the older days under the REDACTED chose to establish a new citadel on Nova Terra, a world in the Segmentum Obscurus. This Nova Terra Ecclesiarchy lasted for a millennium and ended in the Ecclesiarchic Crusade when REDACTED. Other than the various Black Crusades, in particular the ones that targeted Medusa and the attack of REDACTED which left the Space Wolves Chapter reeling, destroyed any hope of successor chapters with the Chapter permitted by the Warmaster to begin to regrow to de facto Legion status and saw REDACTED, as well as REDACTEd with the Iron Hands undergoing a cultural renaissance following it, the Imperium reached its own apex and time akin to the Age of Technology.</p><p>The Time of Power was a time that was glorious, the Imperium at its apogee, expanding outward, new systems added, and a league established with a Xenos power in the Eastern Fringes known as the T'au, as well as various smaller Xenos enclaves accepted into alliance with the Empire. Controversially, the Warmaster suggested that the Eldar Craftworld Ulthwe, led by the controversial Eldar Psyker Eldrad Ulthran, as ally to the Imperium, and this controversy led to a brief rift between the Emperor and his Warmaster, a rift that led to the onslaught of the new challenges that would mark the slow decay of the Imperium.</p><p>The Age of Apostasy and the Q'Orl Xenocide, M36-8 :</p><p>Under the rebel Goge Vandire, the Cult of Unbelief arose, alleging the Emperor was no God at all, but a powerful superhuman who was perpetuating a knowing fraud, and a malicious genocidal tyrant. Vandire and his Council of Blood, which is alleged to have included the REDACTED orchestrated the largest civil war in the Imperium since the Heresy. Among the casualties of this were the Red Corsairs, who under Huron Blackheart emerged as the major Chaos force of the Maelstrom, declaring themselves loyal to the REDACTED,and the Great Purge ordered by the Emperor in the wake of the fall of Vandire when St. Sebastian Thor, one of the few non-Astartes to qualify as an Emperor's Champion, brought down Vandire in an apocalyptic duel on the world of Armageddon in the First War for Armageddon.</p><p>Next came the Pale Wasting, when a powerful xenos entity of undetermined origin rose from the Ghoul Stars, and induced a strange kind of religious madness that worked in a fashion akin to a more primordial kind of Chaos and yet all too akin to it. The Novamarines chapter, one of the most revered of the Ultramarines Successor chapters, was the major force that spearheaded a joint Astartes force including an Iron Warriors force equal in strength to a full Legion of Heresy times. This force, commanded by the great Iron Warriors leader Kroeger, saw this Triarch die on the battlefield in the battle that determined the course of the Wasting, to save the life of the Novamarines chapter master, who in turn took command on the field and led to victory in the REDACTED.</p><p>The dual blows of Vandire's Reign of Blood and the Wasting were major strikes at the confidence of the Imperium, and the blows were further magnified by the Q'Orl Swarm, which fought a major war with two Eldar Craftworlds that ended in their total destruction, gaining access due to an over-belligerent and not-sensible strike by an over-confident Imperium strike force to the Warp Drive and engineering it to suddenly undergo a great expansion.</p><p>In the course of M37 they tested new forces and doctrines in a set of local raids that in retrospect were clearly buildups to something greater, and permitted them to hone their skills, amplified by dissent among the Imperium in the Segmentum Pacificus, believed to reflect the psychic power of the Swarm-lords who held and hold far more power than conventionally expected.</p><p>In the last years of M37, the Q'Orl Swarmlord sought to orchestrate an expansion akin to the Imperium's own Great Crusade, which it termed the War for the Stars. For five hundred years, the Imperium in turn turned to fight the Q'Orl Xenocide, facing for the first time a Xenos threat with power that could, if it had grown further, have damaged it far more than the War of the Beast did. Such was the scale of this war that the forces of Chaos began new and greater incursions from the Eye, with M38 witnessing in the last phase the first incursions by Chaos Primarchs bar individual duels with the Warmaster on REDACTED and REDACTED and during the REDACTED.</p><p>One, the Daemon Primarch Angron, established the Dominion of Fire, and under the direct command of the Emperor of Mankind himself, as well as the Warmaster, the full weight of the Imperator Somnium and the Custodes and the REDACTED, as well as the full weight of the Iron Warriors Legion, which had attained its current strength of half a million strong, were directed against the Lord of the Red Sands. On the battlefield of Ghenna, the Dominion of Fire ended when the Emperor slew the Traitor Primarch with a manner that REDACTED and led to both the collapse of the XII Legion and to a blow against REDACTED.</p><p>In the other case the Daemon Primarch Alpharius sought to challenge the Warmaster at Hydra Cordatus where REDACTED. The loss of two such figures meant a great blow struck the Traitor Legions, but it inadvertently strengthened the hand of the Everchosen, who was able to wield this power to start unifying the forces of Chaos.</p><p>Age of the Waning, M38-41: </p><p>In this era, the problems facing the Imperium began to mount. The Great Enemy under the unified leadership of the Everchosen began to move on progressively greater scales, leading to colossal battles fought over and around the world of Cadia. Nine great battles were fought, each of them under his personal control. In each of the nine he was repelled, and yet it is the belief of Inquisitors that REDACTED. The Daemon Primarch Rogal Dorn emerged from the Eye of Terror into Realspace for the first time in a very long time to join the Everchosen in a joint assault on worlds of the Segmentum of Iron, these worlds ultimately falling where the Daemon Primarch was present but holding where he was not. The first of the Necrons began to awaken from their long sleep (though it is rumored that the Necron leaders known as the Silent King and Trazyn the Infinite have been active since the Unity, if not earlier).</p><p>Various actions undertaken by the Emperor that made sense in later ages, and the promotion of the cult of the Saint of Molech, which began in this era, set the shadows of this Age of Ending, as well as rumors of REDACTED. The Word Bearers Primarch Lorgar, REDACTED. The result of REDACTED. The rise of new Ork WWWWAAGGHHHS of greater strength left the Imperium tested from a new faction and fashion that it had not anticipated. Though not yet equal to the new Beast that would arise on Armageddon, his predecessor, Warboss Rustbusta, fresh from a triumph over an Imperial Fist Forge World at Castellax, was turned to Armageddon, where one of the largest scale wars of the Imperium's existence since the Q'Orl Xenocide forced escalating militarization of the population. The new tithes of souls and bodies to fuel the furnaces of war meant the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion, where a secessionist bloc of aristocrats declared for the provincial rights of various smaller sub-blocs within the Segmentums Pacificus and Ultramar, and this civil war combined with the Second War for Armageddon deepened problems further. The ever-increasing power of the Imperial Creed and its worship of the Master of Mankind as a living God meant that REDACTED which left entire worlds depopulated and heralding ascension into the REDACTED.</p><p>New Warp phenomena connected to REDACTED began to appear with ever greater frequency, Living Saints that commanded fabulous powers of unknown nature, the Legion of the Damned, led by the figure of a tenth son, reborn in his father's wrath. The so-called Storm of the Emperor's Wrath followed a major incursion by REDACTED that brushed the outer edges of Segmentum Solar. Rather than heralding greater strength for the Imperium, these signs of the Emperor's might brought further stress as the new Warp power brought dislocation and turmoil to the Imperium's Warp-communications.</p><p>Finally, in the Battle of Pythos, the fourth Everchosen, Abaddon the Despoiler, was unambiguously beaten by Warmaster Perturabo in personal combat, after which the Fifth Everchosen, the Daemon Primarch Lorgar appears to have arisen as the new focus of the powers of Chaos.</p><p>Between this and the emergence of the Xenos entities Cegorach and Ynnead in REDACTED, it is clear that the connection between the Aeldari prophecy of a Rana Dhandra and the old ramblings of the Chaos Prophetess Cyrene Valantion, held in REDACTED until REDACTED speaking of a Time of Ending when Gods and Mortals would meet is nigh.</p><p>Cyrene Valantion once told me that REDACTED and that REDACTED. In seeing this, and the golden curse spiraling its way through Holy Terra and the murmurs of a terrible name forbidden since ancient times, one of the names connected to REDACTED, I cannot but wonder if this Alluminas and my Father might not be REDACTED.</p><p>Notes from the hand of the Emperor of Mankind, recovered in the wake of the Endless Dawn-Such is the curse of responsibility laid upon posterity by what was redacted from my son's writings that were more specifics known, humanity might find truth more troublesome than the stories needed to know, or to be known. An incomplete truth shown to my son Horus led to a war that reaved the Galaxy and brought the greatest sorrows that I have ever known or will ever know. It is the nature of knowledge of certain things that it is in itself corrupting, and the wisdom of the future is not what my son Magnus said on Nikea, the pursuit of all knowledge, but the regulation of that knowledge firmly within specific boundaries.</p><p>I can feel the change at work, the call of what ten thousand years of worship and of sacrifice are bringing into being. Those of the future who have seen these results, ponder these words. Why things are done matters more than that they are done in themselves. Failure to understand this underlies why the Imperium has undergone its most major changes. And in the times before it, the Ecumene of Terra.</p><p>Beware that power that comes offering the greatest good without great prices paid for it.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. The History of the Imperium, War of the False Primarch II:</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Horus Lupercal, Warmaster of the Imperium of M31 from another universe, has dug into the Sabbat worlds and as much of Segmentum Pacificum as he can reach. As he ensures his men dig in firmly, he gets a hail from the self-proclaimed Warmaster of the strange new realm he's found himself in. </p><p>For his part, Perturabo serves as his father's herald, and seeks to make sense of the seemingly impossible.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>
    <strong>The Iron Blood: </strong>
  </em>
</p><p>In the wake of the Siege of Terra and the Scouring, and then at last in the War of the Beast the Warmaster's flagship had become used to damage. Then the Orcs of WAAGGHH Beast had put paid to it in one of the more dramatic battles of that war, a battle that had seen the attack moon ruined by Perturabo's weaponization of the fall of his flagship. The new <em>Iron Blood</em> Perturabo had commissioned in one of the few cases of his still-vengeful loathing of Rogal Dorn, who in the time since the Iron Cage had gone to the Eye of Terror to fester there with his other kin. Like the <em>Phalanx</em> it was a moon retrofitted into a starship (and in this sense, too, it was a mockery of the processes of the Orks, showcasing that what they did by feral animalistic savagery the Imperium could vastly exceed by the skill and adeptness of human science). </p><p>In this case, one of the moons of Uranus, where one of the first and the most bitter battles of the Scouring had been fought, one tossed to the outer edges of the Solar System's orbit. Now, the <em>Iron Blood</em> was remade in Perturabo;s image as the moon of the heartland of the old Inwit Imperium had been in Dorn's. It seemed more of a militarized city blended with a bunker blended with a vast arms depot, an engine of war and perfect beauty and perfect menace. Not the gilded perfection of Fuilgrim before his fall and the horrific changes that had been made most manifest after his repulse in the Battle of the Saturnine Wall. Not a cathedral in space as the old Bearers of the Word had built, nor quite the old stark brutish functionality of his first ship. As Warmaster, Perturabo's desires as architect were no longer hidden beneath the cold facade and the all too ready release to murderous violence. Both endured, in new guises, for one could not readily alter a persona worn and worn hard during the long years of the Crusade, and the longer span since.</p><p>What had changed was that the idea of the Iron Warriors as architects endured as much as their ferocity on the battlefield and the sheer merciless firepower unleashed by their logistical skills. The Palace that had become devastated was rebuilt as an aesthetic marvel ridden with enough firepower to flatten everything around it for 100 mile radii inland. Ultramar had been rebuilt in a challenge given to Perturabo when he had demanded his Legion stay one rather than be partitioned and noted the very effort to partition it had nearly driven it into the ranks of Horus. And the new<em> Iron Blood</em> was thus a sphere that could level planets, let alone Astartes fleets with its weight of firepower and a spined marvel of Olympian and Iron Warriors engineering that he knew the False Primarch's ships would detect.</p><p>He had made concessions to the expected theater of a Warmaster (his brother had had the egotism to place his title as the equivalent of the phrase but Perturabo would see Roboute in the Eye before he'd call himself 'The Lord Guilliman.' Warmaster was a fine phrase and so would it remain). His command throne, once spartan on the old flagship had become more ornate, in the shape of a golden lion (and this in turn a tribute to his fallen brother the Lion, vanished with Caliban after circumstances unknown). He had made a concession to sentiment in having the sigils of all the loyalist Legions placed upon the visible elements of the Throne, a reminder that he had not always been alone as he was now, and feared he would remain.</p><p>Once, he had envied Horus this and seen in it the true reason for his promotion more than skill. Now that he faced the world Horus knew, where there was Emperor and single Primarch, where what burdens of the Imperium were not on the Emperor were on him, he regretted that envy and the harsh thoughts and occasional words that had come from it. So many regrets and no time to say them, for only fools looked to the past.</p><p>An ironic thought, he mused, as his flagship and its fleet, with a force that included his Triarch Falk (for he was always Barban Falk to Perturabo even if the Siege had left him withdrawn into himself and calling himself merely by his title)'s Legion as well, had arrived to face this improbability.</p><p>The Horus he knew had been charismatic and unmercifully arrogant, hiding ambition and bloodlust behind a well-set mask of affability, one that would have convinced most. He also had bought himself regular glory in the blood and iron of other Legions, with another incident that he regretted. When he had nearly come to blows with Corax for insisting that his Legion not be the only one to pay the price for Horus's glory, and had accused his brother of cowardice. In later years, when the Heresy had come and he had had chances, he had actually come as close as it was possible between two such demigods meant to lay low galaxies to confessing his folly, and that it was wrath that had yet to be as mastered as it was going to be.</p><p>Corax had accepted that, then, and the rifts between then-Legions and now a set of Legions and a chapter (that he knew had no real intention to adhere to the Codex and he quietly went out of its way to shield it from suspicion) had come closer.</p><p>Now here. Now at the edge of the Segmentum Pacificum and the Shabbat worlds, where  a spectre had risen out of the Crusade, seemingly, clad in the old white with the sigil of a wolf and a moon. Now, instead of refusing to go to the past, the past had somehow, impossibly risen to face him. He knew the ship marks, and identifications. These were the ships of the XVI Legion, including many destroyed in known clashes of the Heresy, several of which he knew his Legion had destroyed and all their hands. Then they had changed, they had become more nearly organism than a ship, reeking with the fell witchery the bloated thing Horus had become had let in and ruined something that he had despised but grudgingly knew was good, so long as it had a sufficient bridge of corpses to vault over and declare the vaulting won what the bridge of corpses had done.</p><p>The ship that he saw here was <em>The Sword of Cthonia, </em>and his brows furrowed more thunderously when he saw the leadership. Iacton Qruze and his company, and presumably dragooned local auxiliaries. He had met Qruze a few times when Malcador had brought the man into his Knights Errant, and he had learned from Garviel Loken of the man's fate on the Vengeful Spirit. Qruze was an anachronism but a vision of the Imperium as it could have been, as more than part of him wanted it to be. Not a state of war, wars, and rumors of war led by murderous superhumans but a state of hearty, hale, healthy people living in a world of peace that honored the dead of war and knew in them warnings that it should never rise again. That vision inspired Qruze and it had since his family had arrived on Terra in the days of the Unity, when he had risen to become one of the great heroes of the XVI Legion, and had made his name in the fall of Luna and its enclaves, the Selenar under the last of their cult leaders, the wretch Serenity, falling with the call that had given the Legion its names.</p><p>Now that name appeared again, and a ship of Luna Wolves make, that his ship had shot down during the opening stages of the Siege of Terra, when the ship had been one of the first to be the vanguard of the fleets breaking into the Segmentum Solar.</p><p>He sent a blinked order via his new and improved Logos to a servitor, who began to open a hail.</p><p>Not long after its sending there was a response. On the command throne was the captain of the Third Company of the old Luna Wolves, in white plate. His helm was off and his face was aged and ancient, his eyes knowing and puzzled.</p><p>"Lord Perturabo," he said, his voice level and cautious.</p><p>--------</p><p>Iacton Qruze had not been certain quite what to make of the appearance of the idents when the starship had registered them. A fleet, and a vast fleet, far moreso than the Iron Warriors fleet that had retreated beyond the edge of Segmentum Pacificus but had remained, blockading it. They had expanded to the other end of the guns, not yet willing to challenge a fleet of the IV Legion that seemed improbably vast. The fear of opening fire on fellow Astartes, of compounding the folly and the severity of the battle with the Word Bearers near Davin restrained them. It seemed to restrain the Iron Warriors.</p><p>And now this. A vast ship, one that was like a dark mirror of the <em>Phalanx, </em>and the vision of the self-proclaimed Warmaster in towering Terminator Plate that had more gold than he had ever imagined the Hammer of Olympia being willing to wear. His face retained its usual dour expression as if a canine had taken a shit on his carpet, and the eyes retained that usual element that reminded him so much of Ferrus Manus. There were strange ironies in how similar the Lord of Iron and the Lord of Medusa could be, both towering brutally rugged giants with skill with machinery and personalities to curdle milk. One obsessed with the weakness of the flesh, one more able to connect to machines than people.</p><p>Ferrus's face was paler and he did not have the set of dreadlocked cables that connected with his head and gave Perturabo the look he'd imagined a hypothetical Angron with sanity might have had. His voice retained the smouldering rage that never hid itself, the tectonic power of syllables less enunciated and more barked with staggering power in the sound.</p><p>"Iacton Qruze," he heard that voice, and his hearts quickened and he resisted the impulse to bow, or to give the impression to bow, with the greatest of difficulty. Even with his....difficulties, with both his own Legion and others, Perturabo was a Primarch, and all Primarchs had this innate to their gifts. Well, Angron was an exception and Alpharius depended on if it was Alpharius-Alpharius or just Alpharius.</p><p>"Or something with the face of Iacton Qruze. The Qruze I knew was a good man, one of the best in his Legion, who did not let his father's successes go to his head and remained Cthonian to his core. He died, at the hands of the Everchosen on his flagship, his hearts torn out by the Talon."</p><p>Qruze paled, remaining silent.</p><p>"I am not that man, Lord of Iron. I am the commander of the third company of the Luna Wolves, called the Half-Heard. My fellows humor me by pretending it's because my stories are only partially interesting. I know they don't give a damn for what they think are old stories and obsolete."</p><p>Perturabo nodded.</p><p>"Again you sound convincing," his voice rumbled, almost snarled.</p><p>"You sound like the Iacton Qruze I knew. The problem is that the man I knew is dead, and the dead do not walk." </p><p>Qruze harrumphed. "Not what my friend Loken said from Davin."</p><p>Perturabo moved slightly, his hulking armor moving closer into the screen.</p><p>"You know of Davin?"</p><p>"Yes, it was a moon where we were drawn to, because of a supposed revolt by Eugan Temba, the governor there. Erebus said he rose up against our Primarch, and that we were to go there and lay low a rebellion. I was not one of the ones sent to fight on the world, though Loken, Torgaddon, and others were, including the commander. The commander fought Temba who he said was swollen by some Warp spawn named Nurg-leth-"</p><p>He noticed Perturabo's eyes widening slightly and saw a slight twitch of his lips.</p><p>"You know of that name, my lord?"</p><p>"I do. That was where the Horus I knew fell and ceased to be a man and became a monster. We knew that he fell. You say Erebus was involved in this?"</p><p>"Yes, my lord. Lorgar Aurelian has turned traitor to the Master of Mankind, and he sought to kill the commander and make him into a beast out of the worst shadows of the Unity. I do not think that he would stop at the commander alone, and if the Imperium is to be saved, we must bring warning. My father would give you this warning himself." </p><p>The towering entity remained silent for a time.</p><p>"You say the being going by my brother's name would give this warning?"</p><p>"Yes, my lord."</p><p>"Then let him speak to me himself. I will not give the order to fire unless my father says so."</p><p>"The Emperor is coming here?" </p><p>Perturabo nodded, a single sharp stiff motion that seemed more mechanicall than many machines Qruze had encountered.</p><p>Three days later, a vast ship manifested out of the Warp.</p><p>It was a towering and skillful manifestation of humanity's vision for the stars, a thing no less able to lay low worlds than the hulking spined moon that looked upon it.</p><p>It was the <em>Vengeful Spirit </em>as it had been, painted the brilliant white hue of its Legion, the Eye of Terra visible on its conning tower. On the prow was the sigil of the Luna Wolves, shining and refurbished and traces of scars that hinted at a recent past trip through the Empyrean that had not been kind to the great ship.</p><p>--------</p><p>On his flagship, Perturabo waited and then he could not hide the visible shock and unease when a voice echoed with its old power and the old tones that were achingly familiar, memories of lost, better times when hope had flowered unhindered rather than the times after it had brought both the Imperium and humanity itself to the edge of a terrible fall into an abyss from which it could never rise.</p><p>"Perturabo, my brother, what madness is this?"</p><p>An image appeared as he'd responded to the impossible hail. An image of a giant in eggshell white with a single eye that gleamed with a reddish light. His armor showed signs of battle damage hastily repaired, bolter rounds and charrring and even melting. His once-flawless face was marred by a single scar that stopped short of his left eye, but it was.....</p><p>Perturabo spoke in wonder:</p><p>"Horus, my brother, it is you. How?"</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Index Astartes, I Legion Dark Angels</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A description of the I Legion, the original Adeptus Astartes, children of Caliban haunted by dark secrets.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Shrouded in mystery with overlapping layers of organization and secrecy shared by no other First Founding chapter, the Dark Angels are at one remove the most revered and awe-inspiring force of the Legiones Astartes short of the Warmaster's own Legion. At another they are haunted by the consequences of ancient failures and by the burdens of many secrets, of which the Fallen are but the one that draws the most attention. Few among the Chapters can rival their successes on behalf of the Master of Mankind, and with the resurrection of the Lion, the Chapter has come to a new point in its history. </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Origins: </strong>
</p><p>The Dark Angels, as befits a chapter of such profound divisions, have an origin that itself reflects a multi-faceted set of cliques that even under the auspices of the Lion never fully congealed and became more profound after the Lion's disappearance for the bulk of the Long War. The first Dark Angels were the very first Astartes, unveiled in the wake of an abortive rebellion launched as a consequence of blood from misunderstanding by an Imperial Provost Marshal who due to erroneous intelligence claimed REDACTED. This deployment, the first of the use of any Astartes, saw the Emperor return to Terra and empower the Five Thousand with shielding against the baleful influence of the Warp. In the last half-century of the Unity, these first Astartes were joined in particular by the IV, XIII, XVI, and XVII Legions. </p><p>Until the discovery of the Lion, the eleventh Primarch to be discovered, the I Legion which went only by the name of the I Legion, ended up developing an identity crisis. The Five Thousand became the core and an inner circle of the Legion, the additional recruits to its ranks on Terra never fully accepted and to a degree seemingly never fully desired. The future Fallen warlord Merir Astelan was denied the status of Legion Master in favor of another, and it is believed that his emergence as a dangerous renegade Blackshield fighting the Imperium began here.</p><p>The Legion encountered their Primarch, the knightly figure known as the Lion, on the Chaos-haunted world of Caliban, a world of dark forests where creatures called Nephilla and great beasts stalked the woods. In retrospect, Caliban is clearly one of the most direct cases of a Primarch exposed to the dark forces of the Warp, and it is to the credit and to the true honor of the Lion that exposed to a power greater than on any other world save Prospero that he never fell, nor did half his Legion. Not long after his discovery, the Lion was drawn with a Primarch discovered within six months of his own, the warlord Jaghatai Khan of Mundus Planus, and taken with him, the Primarch Fulgrim of the III Legion, and Horus Lupercal to the world of Molech where REDACTED.</p><p>In the wake of this and of the other actions taken, the first major deployment of the I Legion under its Primarch was the world of Sarosh, where REDACTED led to the decision of the Lion to dispatch the future first of the Fallen, Luther to Caliban to REDACTED. The second, and the biggest war fought by the Legion in its history to that point was the Rangdan Xenocides, a set of three wars against a vast and aggressive xenos force where the II and XI Legions REDACTED while the Lion's Legion sank from being the largest and most prominent of the Legions to being eclipsed by the Iron Warriors, Word Bearers, and Ultramarines. The impact of this war and the devastating forces unleashed, as well as working together with the II, XI, Ghost, and VI Legions is said to have had some major mental and emotional impacts on the Lion. It is uncertain whether the departure of Luther to Caliban had a greater impact than the Xenocides but either way the Lion is said to have become more withdrawn and distant a figure. </p><p>During the Great Crusade only the XIII and XVI Legions had conquests that outpaced the I, and it is argued that the Lion was aspiring to become Warmaster until it was clear that Horus Lupercal was chosen for this role. Whatever truth lies here, the relations between the Lion and Horus were strained, and those between the Lion and the future Praetorian of Terra little better. When the news of the rebellion of Horus and the Isstvan atrocity struck out, the Lion met his equally aloof and distant brother Rogal Dorn where REDACTED. During the Heresy, the I Legion pursued vital roles behind the scenes, fighting the VIII Legion and ultimately destroying its cohesion as a Legion in the Thramas Crusade, involved with the Ultramarines and the IX Legion in REDACTED where REDACTED and ultimately it was the Lion who ensured the other two Legions began their long fight to the Throneworld.</p><p>During the Siege of Terra, 30,000 Dark Angels under the command of Corswain made planetfall on Terra and would fight with a distinguished record during the Siege, ensuring the retreat of the Emperor's Children from Terra altogether and defeating the Word Bearers under the not-yet-daemon Primarch Lorgar who made an unexpected appearance and sought to REDACTED, though the price of this victory was the death of the noble Corswain, who died and said "I left my blade in a Primarch's back" as he expired, the Seventeeth Primarch retreating carried away by his sons.</p><p>In the wake of the defeat of the Traitor Legions during the Siege, the Lion was drawn into </p><p>
  <strong>Code Vermilion level security information here for the eyes of the loyal sons of the Lion only: </strong>
</p><p>
  <em>In the wake of an attempt by Lord Luther to wield a Saroshi assassination attempt against the Lion by a high yield atomic, Lord Luther and the Librarian Zahariel were sent along with others of the Five Thousand and several of the most prominent veterans of the Order to Caliban. Along with them twenty years later would be sent Merir Astelan. For those proud sons of the Angel, missing wars such as the Rangdan Xenocide, where the II Primarch Sigmar Heldenhammer was lost and the XI Primarch Malevolion sought to slay the Emperor and was brought down by Leman Russ before the Emperor's vision, and other wars of the Crusade and the Heresy, was a great shame and a great failure. Under Lord Luther, who was the Lion's father and mentor, the dissatisfaction grew. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>To the Fallen the Imperium was a destructive force that ruined the path of Caliban, though not all of them agree or have agreed on the courses taken. There are three categories of Fallen, the ones most loyal to the Lord Luther, who began as agents of separatism aspiring to a miniature Empire of Caliban, and were ultimately seduced into the path of the Ruinous Powers by the Mystai lord Zahariel, the outright Chaos Marines known as the Mystai, and a far greater assortment of renegades and Blackshields who since the destruction of Caliban in an incident marking one of the most clear cases of time travel in the history of the Imperium make up the vast preponderance of the Fallen. Since most of these Fallen retain the colors of either the Dark Angels or the Order (and since the latter case are so similar to the former) the decision was made, following the destruction of Caliban and the taking of the unconscious Lion and the raving, insane Lord Luther into the Rock, the last surviving portion of Caliban, to conceal the existence of the Fallen. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>A decision made with grave focus, the hunt for the Fallen and the destruction of their various attempts to carve out smaller Astartes Empires and taking these renegades to the Rock, and the cleansing by fire and the wheel for those who have fallen to the Great Enemy, forms one of the primary missions of the I Chapter, and is why we retain Legion strength when necessary. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>A still greater controversy was the decision of the then-Grand Master Tecumseh to go to the Warmaster and the Emperor to disclose the existence of the Fallen to the two most powerful people in the Imperium following a brutal clash between a detachment of Iron Warriors led by the venerable Triarch known as the Warsmith and a Fallen Empire led by the Blackshield Belath and a detachment including forces of the Black Legion and the Thousand Sons. With this disclosure and the forgiveness of the Emperor and His understanding, the secret endures and the conquest is now not our Chapter's shame but one of our secret strengths, a task that we alone, like the loyal Iron Warriors, have the strength to fulfill and so shall we until the stars die out.</em>
</p><p>Reshaping itself after the destruction of Caliban in what was said to be an incident caused by a dreadful Warp-infused accidental obliteration of the planet, the Dark Angels chapter became a new force with elements of its older missions retooled. It retained the Wing structures and a new set of hierarchies of secrets, as well as the largest archaeotech repositories of any First Founding chapter. There are missions, especially around the Ghoul Stars and specific places where Necron Lords have arisen from their long sleep and in clashes with the hyper-violent Rak'Ghols that one of the most secret of all the secret weapons in the Chapter's arsenal is brought out. Unusually for a Loyalist chapter this Chapter retains the largest amount of Warp weaponry, moreso even than the Grey Knights. It is said that if the VI Legion is the Emperor's Executioners, the I Legion are the Emperor's Devastators, called on to wage the most brutal and annihilation-focused wars, such that only the Dark Angels remember their foes in whatever ways they choose to remember them.</p><p>In the waning years of M41, the Lion returned as if by a miracle and appeared during the War for the Maelstrom, drawing his sons together in Legion strength to deliver the V Legion from REDACTED. With his return and the resurrection of Legion status by merging in all but five successor chapters, the Dark Angels are once more one of the most potent forces at the Imperium's disposal, forces of ruin such that xenos are left only with ashes and the memories of tears where they tread.</p><p>Too, in the wake of the fall of Caliban, the Chapter's culture underwent a fundamental change. Caliban was a Knight world as well as a Chaos world, in the wake of its fall, the Dark Angels have become a culture heavily shaped by the legacy of the Algonquin cultures of old Merica, adapting elements of a Longhouse structure on their Legion worlds, a pact among Chapters modeled after the old Haudenosaunee Confederation of Old Earth, and a set of specific warrior traits likewise derived.</p><p>There are few among the Chapters that have taken these influences, though the Seventh and Eleventh Foundings of Space Marines saw other chapters adapting from other cultures. This change itself is unusual, and it is speculated that the culture of the old Haudenosaunee has some connection to the reinvention of the old Wings and secret hierarchies at the heart of the chapter.</p><p>
  <strong>Beliefs: </strong>
</p><p>In the period up to and in the immediate aftermath of the Heresy, the Dark Angels were products of multiple influences, and shared no true commonality of belief. The Five Thousand, the original deep core of the Legion, were affected by the aftermath of suppressing one of the very first rebellions against the Imperium, the bitter last phase of the war against Kalagann of Ursh, and the dual service with the IV Legion against Dalmoth Kym, the last of the great tyrants of the Unity. Their creed was very strictly reliant on the old Imperial Truth, holding that there was a godless universe and that the Emperor was a Perpetual and Psyker of enormous power, but not a deity. Almost all of the Five Thousand remained loyal to the Imperium, and even those like Merir Astelan that joined the Fallen never fell to Chaos, which makes them no less dangerous and no less a threat to the long-term future of the Imperium. </p><p>The First Legion as it arose in the Unity, expanding from five to a hundred thousand, was divided between the hardline Imperial Truth of the Five Thousand and the more loosely defined adherence to it on the part of the rest of the Legion. Interestingly the Legion developed its own Librarius independent of the vision adapted by the Khan, the Blood Angel, and the Crimson King, and its traditions were more akin to a variant of the Order for Psykers. Its culture and its beliefs were affected by the reality of being the First and having no clear sense of itself, with a deep chasm that was only partially healed after the discovery of the Lion and Luther on Caliban.</p><p>The First Legion in the Heresy adapted the organizational structure of the Order, which itself mirrored the Astartes (and did so before the Lion, as it was made by a founding figure who mentored both the Lion and Luther in the oldest days of the Order). Its creed was not as strict an adherence to the Imperial Truth as others, as Psykers had prominent roles as weapons in the sense envisioned by the Khan, and due to the greater exposure to the nature of Chaos and of its threats the I Legion spent time facing Daemonic incursions at a level more intense than the Thousand Sons or the Sons of Horus.</p><p>In the wake of the Forging, the Dark Angels have never made a serious effort to adapt the Imperial Creed, believing that the Creed is anathema to the original vision of the Master of Mankind. They are loyal servants of the Emperor, and of his original vision of a secular godless cosmos even in the wake of the horrors of the Heresy. It is for this reason that the Dark Angels were given an honor not unlike that given to the original Emperor's Children to wear the Palatine Aquila if so wished, seen as a gesture from both the Emperor and the Warmaster in gratitude that the original dream was not forgotten. Officially, to the Dark Angels, the Creed is for mortals, the Emperor is an immortal and the mightiest of all Psykers, but to worship him as a deity is beneath those who share both his blood and that of his son.</p><p>Unofficially their beliefs are shaped by the Algonquin influences on their creed, and by the lost of the Omphagea organ. It is said that those Astartes who independently re-develop it are called Wendigos, and this particular gene-seed mutation sees them labeled with the Fallen. Too, the Chapter and now Legion has adapted a kind of closeness and almost democratic spirit shaped, albeit, by the overlapping initiations and secrecy and the Wings, that matches only the Iron Hands as far as changes in the wake of the Heresy. The Dark Angels have always been among the most unique of the Emperor's Astartes, and they retain this even into the Rhana Dandra, as the Imperium and the Galaxy tilts at the edge of an abyss.</p><p>
  <strong>Recruitment and Geneseed: </strong>
</p><p>The Dark Angels' geneseed has seen only one flaw, a predilection to secrecy and secretiveness that has produced flaws, among the greatest the five-millennia effort to retain the secret of the Fallen only in their own eyes. </p><p>It does, however, come with the loss of one of the 19 organs, the Omphagea. Alone among the Astartes they cannot do the kind of ritual cannibalism that other Legions and chapters can do to retain information. In the Algonquin cultures that colonized the stars, the cannibal was the most abhorred of all individuals and cannibalism has a special horror for them, hence the Dark Angels retain an especial loathing for the servants of Khorne. The Chapter and now restored Legion recruits from an empire within the Imperium known as the Tithe, and from the Tithe likewise recruits auxiliaries and forces of the Guard and PDF that appear to obey no masters other than first the Grand Master of the Dark Angels chapter and now the Lion.</p><p>
  <strong>Divisions/Wings: </strong>
</p><p>In the earliest phase of the wars fought by the Astartes in the last decades of the Unity and the first half-century of the Great Crusade, all of the early Legions were organized in a pattern known as Wings. These Wings retained expertise that worked in a perpendicular sense to Legions, permitting a kind of flexibility on the battlefield that the more formal Legion structures that evolved under the Principia Bellicosa and the influence of the Primarchs would permit. Alone among the Legions and later chapters, the Dark Angels retained this structure, terming it ultimately the Hexagrammaton. </p><p>The Six Wings are the</p><p>Deathwing-Also known as the inner circle of the Dark Angels, this Terminator-composed force led the Chapter during the time of the Lion's disappearance, and whatever original military function the Deathwing retained is lost and unknown to the courses of history. The Deathwing is the repository of the Chapter's lore, and has become obsolete with the reappearance of the Lion, though the term is applied still to his elite. They are the only ones among the Chapter who have full knowledge of certain pecularities among the Chapter's orgnaizational structure, information that they volunteer still less than others among the Dark Angels.</p><p>Ravenwing-Often seconded with the White Scars and their successors, the Ravenwing are the reconnaissance and air focused troops within the Dark Angels. Little of their organization and their methodology is known outside the forces that have worked with the Scars, even to the Warmaster and the Emperor.</p><p>Dreadwing-The Dreadwing, another of the great secrets of the Dark Angels, is the force called upon to bring annihilation as only the Dark Angels can. Its protocols and secrets are known only to that subset of Dark Angels that fall into this clique within their ranks. Where they walk, life is no more and even among the fiendish weaponry available to Devastator forces in other Legions theirs are weapons seen and rightly so with fear and trembling. Only the Chapter Grand Master and now the Lion can sanction their use.</p><p>Firewing-A specialized order that both retained the greatest expertise in Daemon-hunting, this Wing was the most secret of a secretive Legion, and the portion of the Dark Angels that was detached from the broader Chapter to both form the Consecrators successor chapter (and in this sense re-absorbed into the re-established Legion) and to serve as the Angels of Fire as auxiliaries with the Grey Knights. As with the Grey Knights knowledge of them is concealed from the Imperium on the whole, and their deployment is only in the matters of the most profound concern.</p><p>Ironwing-This Wing served as a model of armored assaults and combined arms warfare that was adapted and modified by the early IV Legion, the Corpse Grinders, and its function is considered moribund and obsolescent in the wake of the growth of the Warmaster's Legion during the Long War. While the Stormwing was resurrected from the lost chapters of history, the Ironwing was not, and its traditions and symbolism are lost to the Imperium for all time.</p><p>
  <strong>Vermilion Level Security: </strong>
</p><p>Stormwing-Believed lost after the end of the Heresy, the Lion's return was marked with a triumphant crescendo for the Stormwing, which relieved the V Legion from an unexpectedly powerful onslaught by both the Word Bearers Dark Apostle Erebus, who met his death at the dual swordsmanship of the Lion and the Warhawk, and by the hitherto unknown Xenos species known as the Skaven. Wearing a specific sub-mark of Cataphractii armor and with very specialized adaptations for boarding, these are the most true Marines among the Space Marines. </p><p>Their devastation in war is unrivaled, and even the spaceship-capturing specialists of the XI Legion had no true equal to them in wartime. In the absence of the XI Legion, the Stormwing has been allowed by the Lion to form a chapter of its own using the Wing title, to fill a void that has been missing among the Legions and Successor Chapters.</p><p>
  <strong>The Fallen, Security Category Vermilion: </strong>
</p><p>The Fallen, who are estimated to number all totaled 50,000 or half the strength of a full-fledged Legion, are the assortment of Chaos and Renegade forces that founded the brief-lived Imperium of Caliban in the last years of the Horus Heresy. Defeated in the Scouring in the Caliban Crusade, this Empire, which included such worlds as Zaramund, was potentially capable of restarting the Horus Heresy anew under the corrupted madness of Lord Luther. Since then and since the scattering of the Fallen across space and time, the hunt for the Fallen has been and remains one of the great priorities of the Dark Angels. Other Legions had their ranks affected by Chaos-corrupted and Renegade members, but where the sons of the Warhawk were turned into loyal servants of the Imperium, for the Fallen there is no redemption. </p><p>They have defied and spat upon their oaths to the Imperium, and they retain secrets and technologies known only to the I Legion and have no shyness in using them. Among the most well known of the Fallen are Merir Astelan, Belath, and the Lord Cypher, a mysterious relic of the old Order whose presence in and out of the counsels of both the Traitor Legions and the Imperium are for reasons known only to this semi-mythical figure. The Fallen are not, uniquely among the Traitor Astartes, entirely Chaos forces, they retain the highest number of Blackshields and Renegade Astartes, and it is speculated that their seeming growth to double or even triple in numbers over the Long War reflects their absorption in a willing sense of those among the XX and VIII Legions that did not welcome the touch of the Ruinous Powers and are willing to serve the Fallen in their own Long War.</p><p>For the bulk of the Long War the Fallen had no coherent organization, and were divided among different categories of Warbands.</p><p>In the wake of the resurrection of the Lion, so too did the Fallen reunite under Lord Luther, and the strife that came with the Fallen Angels organized as a new Chaos Legion under Lord Luther and Lord Zahariel, who had returned seemingly from the dead and the destruction of Caliban, has flared up in Segmentum Obscurus.</p><p>In the wake of the victory over and closure of the Maelstrom, the Imperium has made its erasure of the Fallen Legion as its first priority, and a long and bitter war has begun that shall scourge Segmentum Obscurus and for all time end the threat of Lord Luther and his Angels.</p><p>
  <strong>The Tithe of the Rock: </strong>
</p><p>Among the secrets of the Angels held more tightly than that of the Fallen, the Tithe of the Rock is the unofficial name of a mini-Imperium within the Imperium to match that of the Warmaster's Empire of Iron. Slightly larger than the full-scale Ultramar of Lord Guilliman, it is a blend of Forge Worlds, Knight Worlds, and feral worlds that provides the Dark Angels and their successors with both a great many recruits and a logistical base that few among the Legions can match. The Tirhe of the Rock is also claimed, without true proof of the claim, to retain such weapons as a Blackstone Fortress among its ranks and a gift of the original <em>Iron Blood </em>as a place to train the Stormwing in boarding operations. </p><p>The Tithe acknowledged first the Grand Master and then the Lion as king, in all practical purposes, and in the worlds of the Tithe the true source of law is the will of the Dark Angels. The Tithe retains knowledge of manufacturing and creating archaeotech otherwise lost to the Imperium, and accounts for the seemingly miraculous abilities of the Dark Angels to provide technology that would otherwise be lost. The Noospheric creations of Adept Zeth in Mars and her particular philsoophy have seen a revival in the Tithe from the aftermath of the Scouring, and this secret, of a set of the Mechancius that has resurrected the culture of the old Mechanicum and has for all practical purposes seceded from fealty to Mars and is suborned to the First is one that the Dark Angels have maintained as a secret into the Time of Ending.</p><p>The Tithe does not share the Tetrarchy organization of old and M41 era Ultramar, it is linked by a set of Warp beacons and rumored kin to the Pharos technology of distant Sotha among other technologies that rely on signatures in the Warp unlike those connected to any other Chapter or Legion.</p><p>Because of the Tithe, like the Ultramarines and the Traitor Legion known as the Word Bearers, the Dark Angels do not have one homeworld, they have many, though they have adopted a culture heavily kindred to the old Algonquin nations of Merica that serves as a unifying language across the Tithe.</p><p>
  <strong>Watchers in the Dark: </strong>
</p><p>One of the other most profound secrets of the Dark Angels, and as central to their peculiarities as the the Fallen at a different level, the extradimensional Xenos creatures known as the Watchers in the Dark are a species with a long-term tie to Caliban. Known to the Emperor as the Voices in the Woods, the Watches are a Xenos species allied to Mankind and to the Imperium in the wake of the fall of Caliban, though there are claims that the species was tied to a renegade Chaos cult known as the Cabal in the Heresy era. The Watchers maintained the Lion during his rest and in the wake of the fall of Caliban are both allies to and retainers to the Dark Angels, ensuring that their armor functions more efficiently than the other Legions and that their vast arsenal of Warp-tech is maintained. </p><p>What precise powers the Watchers have and any deeper elements of their motivations are unknown.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Index Astartes, X Chapter Iron Hands</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Index covering the Iron Hands from the Unification era to the End Times.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Among the chapters of the First Founding, the history of the Iron Hands, both during the Unity and after it, remains one of the most complex. Unique among the Loyalist Primarchs, theirs was the only Primarch to have indisputably died until the Lord of Ultramar left his stasis field corrupted and was destroyed by the Emperor. The loss of Ferrus Manus has brought great changes to the Iron Hands, several of which are positive, a few of which left challenges the chapter ultimately overcame. Out of all the Loyalist chapters, the Iron Hands have had likewise one of the more complex relationships with the Warmaster and his Legion, one that sees elements of a grudging friendship and a harsh rivalry. </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Origins: </strong>
</p><p>Medusa is now known to be a tomb world of the xenos species known as the Necrons, confirmed when the Necron lord buried beneath the planet awoke in M41 and sought to destroy the Iron Hands in a war that saw the X and IV Legions fighting side by side. In the past this meant that the world had a reputation in the Age of Technology as a place of strange technological marvels on the one hand, and an odd elite caste of seeming automatons on the other. The onset of the Age of Strife destroyed this technologically advanced culture, creating a Social Darwiniistic culture that valued strength over all else. </p><p>To this world came the X Primarch, known as Ferrus Manus. He fought and destroyed a powerful Necron weapon known as Asirnoth, gaining arms of Necrodermis (in some tales, in others plunging the monster into lava meant that his arms were coated in a Necrodermis that his willpower kept from consuming him and his soul in a kind of Bio-Transferrence process by his views on the meaning of the Flesh is Weak). Ferrus Manus ultimately unified the world of Medusa and brought it a thing unusual to that cold world with its shadowy realm of Flayer and likewise influenced monsters: hope.</p><p>Manus was a brutally rugged giant, equal in height and bulk to the Lord of Iron, and among the greatest warlords of the Crusade. His was not the pan-Imperium vision of unification espoused by Horus, the logistical mastery of Perturabo and Roboute Guilliman. His was a simple and unforgiving creed, what was loyal to the Imperium would be granted surrender and acceptance of the new order. What did not would seek oblivion. This creed is most exemplified by the Fall of the Lords of Gardinaal, where a world that held off detachments of the Thousand Sons, Ultramarines, and Emperor's Children saw Ferrus Manus impose order on this with his Legion, and deciding to solve the problem by destroying the capital world and the least populous of the ten, cowing the Gardinaal for all time.</p><p>In the Crusade, the Iron Hands rivaled only the Dark Angels, Word Bearers, and Sons of Horus for the scale of their conquests, though the Iron Hands tended to leave blackened worlds for resettling and this meant that their conquests were both faster and more unforgiving. It is said, though there is no proof of it, that the fear of the Iron Hands rivaled only that of the World Eaters for any world or Imperial force that worked with them.</p><p>Among the stranger oddities of the past of the Legion and its Primarch was that before their fall there was a close tie between the stern and unforgiving robotics-reliant sons of Medusa and the aesthetically driven perfectionists that were the original face of the III Legion. Likewise Ferrus Manus was the closest friend and ally to the peacock Primarch Fulgrim, who would ultimately slay him during the Dropsite Massacre.</p><p>That Ferrus Manus and Perturabo were no allies is likewise not a secret, and these overlapping elements between the disputes between the Gorgon and the Hammer of Olympia would play their parts in the Battle of Isstvan V.</p><p>The Arch-Traitor Horus ordered Fulgrim to bring the Gorgon to his side, and yet the Phoenician and the Gorgon came to a clash that saw the Gorgon defeat and drive off the Phoenician, in the Battle of Callinedes. The motivations that led the Gorgon to split his Legion and to do so by dispatching only his best forces and his brightest ones with him to Isstvan V, and then to take the orders of the Praetorian of Terra to simply unleash Vortex and Phosphex weapons to burn the Traitors rather than give Horus the battle he sought, cannot quite be speculated at with hard proof. The Iron Hands, however, hold that their father was paranoid that Fulgrim's outreach would damn him in the eyes of the Imperium and that his focus on personally slaying the Phoenician drove him to disregard Perturabo's orders and to make planetfall. The Salamanders and the Raven Guard could not and would not let Ferrus do so alone, and in the altered plan Ferrus made overtures to the then-believed loyal Imperial Fists, Word Bearers, Night Lords, and Alpha Legion to join them on the field.</p><p>The result in the Dropsite Massacre was the near-destruction of the Raven Guard and the Salamanders and the death of Ferrus Manus and most of the most veteran and experienced troops of the X Legion, Manus decapitated by Fulgrim and the first Primarch on either side of the Long War to die. In the wake of the death of Ferrus Manus, the Iron Hands would regroup under Shadrak Meduson, de facto Legion Master, and became the core of the long and bitter war waged by the Shattered Legions, a set of cumulative strikes and attrition that bled the Warmaster's forces heavily and contributed to the desperation that motivated the Siege of Terra, and to the kind of decisions made by the Warmaster's forces in that clash. The Iron Hands' deeds as the strongest of the Shattered Legions and the tragic martyrdom of Shadrak Meduson who challenged the Traitor Lord Verulam Moy and was slain in a vicious clash, marked a triumph of the inner strength of Medusa and its sons.</p><p>In the wake of the adaption of the Codex Astartes, the Iron Hands produced only a small assortion of successor chapters, the Iron Fists and the Red Talons the most pre-eminent among them. Otherwise, as with the Salamanders and the Wolves of Fenris the Warmaster gave them permission to retain de facto Legion structures. Uniquely among all the successor chapters, the Iron Hands have adapted a democratic structure that has no parallel in any other Astartes system, even the free-ranging White Scars. They are led by a council that votes by a majority, elected from the clan captains of the Iron Hands, and with a secondary check and balance from the Iron Fathers, and in times of crisis appoint a Dictator who serves for a short time and then resigns service, by choice or coercion, if needs be.</p><p>The Iron Hands, in the form of the Iron Fathers, also have adaptations that others among the First Founding chapters like. The Iron Fathers, a relic of the Crusade and Heresy era Legion, fill the roles in other Legions of both the Techmarine and the Chaplain, and even of the Librarian. Any of these roles may exist singly or together in a single Iron Father, though the Iron Fathers also have the closest connections to the Mechanicus of Mars. A time of strife in M32 known as the Separatism of Iron involved the Red Talon, Autek Mor, claiming that the Mechanicus had tried to suborn the Iron Hands as a Legion of their own and laying siege to the Adepts he blamed for it.</p><p>Up to that point the Iron Hands had displayed reactions that are still predominantly seen as the reactions to the initial trauma of losing their father, the Iron Hand of Medusa, but afterward their reactions changed still further.</p><p>The Iron Hands have been among the most faithful and active of the First Founding chapters, and the only one to face not one but two Black Crusades of the now-deposed Everchosen, Ezekyle Abaddon. The Tenth Black Crusade, the only one to see the Daemon Primarch Rogal Dorn, master of the Imperial Fists, laid siege to Medusa but the Iron Hands not only drove off the Everchosen but attained a unique feat hitherto matched only by the Grey Knights or the Wolves of Fenris and drove off a Daemon Primarch at the height of his manifestation, by virtue of dealing a profound wound to Dorn's Pain Glove.</p><p>The Twelfth Black Crusade, also known as the Second Medusan Crusade, saw the Despoiler return and this time he faced one of the Triarchs and the Grey Knights and also forces of the Wolves of Fenris as well as the Iron Hands, and it is believed that the utter and emphatic failure of this particular Crusade amplified by the defeat on Pandorax contributed to the rise of Lorgar Aurelian as the Everchosen of the End Times.</p><p>Additionally, the Iron Hands withstood in M37 the incident known as the War with the Sapphire King, a Greater Daemon of Chaos Undivided that had laid ties to their grief and anger over the death of Ferrus Manus and pretended to be the resurrection of the Gorgon. The war was a long and a bitter one and it marked the start of a shift in understandings of the Creed of Iron, in ways that are unpredictable and contributed to the emergence of the second Iron Hands successor chapter in ten thousand years.</p><p>On the whole, the Iron Hands have developed a culture that shows that bereft of a Primarch and the autocratic leadership structure in other Legions and Chapters that the Astartes are more adaptable than otherwise believed, and there are even rumors that  the ones who speak more kindly of flesh than iron have sired, occasionally, offspring that have close ties to their clan companies, as with rumors of the Wolves of Fenris. How credible these rumors are or are not is a matter left to Imperial savants to guess at as the Iron Hands have not allowed investigations to verify their truth or lack thereof.</p><p>
  <strong>Organization: </strong>
</p><p>The Iron Hands, like the Dark Angels, have a leadership structure that is unique among the loyalist Legions, though in the Crusade it had closer parallels to the system used by the Death Guard. The Iron Hands mirror the clans of Medusa and organize themselves as clan-companies, this structure amplified by the democratic system of leadership. Despite being divided among the different clans like the Avernii, Karaashi, Ignaraki and the like, each clan-company shares with itself and with the original parent Legion a fairly inflexible structure rooted in a blend of overwhelming firepower and frontal attacks that roll over foes like a tsunami. </p><p>There are nine great clan-companies and seventeen lesser, and the council of the Iron Hands gives a vote to both the greater and the lesser equally. The distinction between the greater and the lesser companies is a mirror both of size and of the ability of clan-companies to regenerate from the losses of the Dropsite Massacre, as well as the connection between Medusan clans and successor chapters.</p><p>The Iron Fathers likewise, in a conclave of eighteen, form a kind of second chamber of the Iron Hands conclave, and have a right to summon the fuller conclave if necessary. Their task is as much the memorial of the chapter's history and ensuring both orthodoxy, a bulwark against a recurrence of the Sapphire King's menace to the Iron Hands, and is subject to a miniature division in its own ranks between the more dogmatic adherents to the Creed of Iron and the transformation of a legionary into a robot in all but the most technical senses, and those who believe as Ferrus Manus modified himself little that true adherence to his creed lies in improving and enhancing elements of the flesh.</p><p>The Dictators that lead the  Chapter have tended to be chosen situationally, though more have been Iron Fathers than Clan-Captains.</p><p>Unlike the other Legions or chapters, the Iron Hands likewise have no true Devastator forces, as they distribute their more deadly weapons more evenly across Clan-companies, a mirror of the robotic transformations indulged in by the Chapter, which means that such devastating force takes a lesser toll than the rest. Likewise they have no jetbike companies nor other adaptations that grant them a lesser tactical flexibility than other Chapters, but more than compensate for this by the highest proportion of Terminators per force as well as other adaptations that ensure an Iron Hands war, once witnessed, is a deadly and inexorable phenomenon that will see the iron Hands slain, to some degree, but nothing for their enemies but ashes.</p><p>All Iron Hands, from Scouts to Chapter Masters, submit to one modification that even the more Flesh-positive Iron Fathers and Chapter battle-brothers adapt, specifically the amputation of their hands and replacement of them by bionics that tend to retain specific modifications. It is these Iron Hands that give the Iron Hands honor in the name of their Primarch, named after his own Iron Hands. The Iron Hands and the Wolves of Fenris are rumored to have rivalries over which Chapter has more redundancy in naming conventions among the more sardonic members of both Legions, but both are products of worlds of frost haunted by monsters, and this rivalry is less for the Wolves than that with the Dark Angels. </p><p>Alone among Chapters, the Iron Hands and their successors have come to believe that even if Ferrus Manus did find a means to return that he would become a leader of the Legion but no longer its voice, nor necessary to their path.</p><p>
  <strong>Structure: </strong>
</p><p>The Iron Hands have a structure of clan companies that are the size of individual chapters of other First Founding Forces, and are at half the size of an old Legion of the First Age. The largest clan companies, the Avernii and the Karaashi, total four thousand Astartes and have small fleets of their own, the smallest total just over a thousand. These clan-companies tend to have self-contained Forge capabilities directed by the Iron Fathers and Iron Adepts, as the rift with Mars means the chapter and its successors have the least reliance on the Mechanicum to produce their weaponry. The Iron Hands thus tend to have weaponry slightly above average in quality and firepower, but lacking vital means of instantaneous communication with other forces. </p><p>The noospheric adaptations of the Dark Angels are eschewed by the Iron Hands, due to a greater reliance on individualism. Clan companies likewise have self-contained combined arms forces, with their punching power depending heavily on the size of the clan and the resources it draws on, with the iron Hands favoring a deliberate retaining of older-model Heresy-era technology over the more modern technology of Mars and of the Empire of Iron.</p><p>On the whole, however, the bulk of an Iron Hands clan-company is a Terminator-heavy force that exists to provide a massive wall of fire and destructive force invulnerable to most foes, and making the Iron Hands near totally a force wielded to make planetfall and in ground combat, or in void combat. The Council of Terra, and it is rumored the Warmaster, see this as a sacrifice of flexibility, though Warmaster Perturabo makes no efforts to dictate force structure to First Founding chapters in the ways that he does to successor chapters that do not have the legacy of the Warmaster's brothers as their founding leaders in a direct sense.</p><p>Iron Warriors armor includes likewise a disproportionate mixture of the most heavy artillery and armored personnel vehicles, not least to include room for the forges. As the rift with the Mechanicus widened, the Iron Hands have gone so far as to develop their own Knights and even Titans, though they have developed but two Imperator-class Titans, the <em>Frather Thamatica </em>and the <em>Ferrus Manus </em>in ten thousand years. In this they have been aided by the degree to which Medusa preserved elements of Dark Age of Technology production, not the Standard Template Constructs themselves but factories in the Ring of Iron that permit manufacture of heavy weaponry at a surprisingly straightforward sense.</p><p>
  <strong>Iron Fathers: </strong>
</p><p>The most unique institution of the Iron Hands, the Iron Fathers perform tasks that are partitioned among multiple entire categories of officers in other Legions. They are, to use the phrasing of the old warlord of Old Earth the Man of Steel, 'engineers of the human soul/' Commanding knowledge of technology, of Psyker arts, and of the arts of morale and Iron Hands and Medusan history and culture, the Iron Fathers consider themselves and rightly so the cores of the Chapter's soul. They are recruited from the ranks of the Chapter from those who show themselves not merely interested in their tasks but able to bear them best, and tend to represent the oldest and the wisest of the Legions. Due to the legacy of Frater Thamatica, among the most capable and skillful inventors of the Age of Legends, there is also much tolerance for eccentricities that would have led to excommunication and traitor status in other Legions. </p><p>Collectively the leaders of the Iron Fathers form a second bloc of Iron Hands, one that has both welcome and fear, depending on the circumstances, from the other leaders of the Chapter.</p><p>An Iron Father may be many things or one thing, but whichever he proves, he is one of the most capable and skillful leaders of one of humanity's most innovative successors of the Age of Legends.</p><p>
  <strong>Geneseed and Recruitment: </strong>
</p><p>The Iron Hands are a smaller chapter than some due, like the Wolves of Fenris, to limiting their recruits to a particular single planet rather than building an empire within the Imperium for recruits. The main flaw their gene-seed has left their Legion is what in the eyes of Imperial savants is a particular kind of dysphoria where the Iron Hands can in the most extreme have a loathing of flesh to match that of the half-mystical Necrontyr of the War in Heaven. Iron Hands tend to be the most long-lived of the Chapters, the oldest of the Chapter up to seven thousand years old and predominantly, if not almost entirely, machine. This longevity means that memories and understandings of the Age of Legend endure most in the Iron Hands of any chapter outside the Iron Warriors, though the smaller size and doctrinal differences mean that the Iron Hands and Iron Warriors range from uneasy allies to regularly being on the brink of potentially starting a new war and a new rift between a chapter and the largest Legion in the Imperium. </p><p>The technological reliance of the Iron Hands, however, means that their recruits are the most steady, as the longevity of the Chapter means its demands on the manpower of Medusa is far less grievous than that of other chapters to their homeworld, meaning that the Iron Hands tend to be seen more positively than other chapters by the standards of their home world as well.</p><p>
  <strong>The Creed of Iron: </strong>
</p><p>The most famous war-cry, and one shared by the Iron Hands and both successor chapters is "The Flesh is Weak." In a paradox of the chapters' development, the creed as they define it is not what Ferrus Manus believed. Manus believed that adaptation and exaltation of the machine over the human frame risked both the humanity and the basic morality of his sons, and intended to address what he saw as a growing tilt to flesh-hatred among the Legion. His death in the dropsite massacre, however, confirmed to the Iron Fathers that an excess of flesh risked their own soldiers taking the same fate as the Primarch. </p><p>Alone among First Founding, Second Founding, and Twenty-Ninth Founding chapters, the Iron Hands revere the memory of Ferrus Manus the warlord even as they eschew ties to Manus and his memory beyond this, and consider Manus to have been a leader skilled in war but flawed and blinded at other levels. The veneration of the Primarch takes a much more clinical sense than its counterpart in other First Founding chapters, with the equivalent devotion focused instead on the great leaders of the Shattered Legions such as Shadrak Meduson, Frater Thamatica, and Crius of the Avernii. Certain clan-companies have made totems of heroes of the Shattered Legions known in the most detail to the Iron Hands, down to modifying their gauntlets in the fashion of those heroes of the dawn of the Imperium.</p><p>To the Iron Hands of the age after the Heresy to the Sapphire King, the goal was internment as dreadnoughts and as total a passage out of the realm of flesh as could be devised. The corruption risked by the Sapphire King has led to modifications of the ideal, though they have not become near universal and both the clan-companies and the Iron Fathers disagree on what modifications are to be made, how they are to be made, and who is to make them.</p><p>Even with the modifications the war cry that the Flesh is Weak endures, as does its spirit. And on the whole, only the Sapphire King, whose existence was a product of issues that even the machine-hearts could not ward against, has been a threat of the Ruinous Powers to the Iron Hands. Theirs has been a Chapter and successors otherwise bereft of major threats from corruption without. The Iron Hands, and unknown to them the Warmaster, believe that very resilience is why the Everchosen sought to destroy them twice, to send a message that such resilience would not be allowed to stand. And yet Medusa and its sons stand to this day.</p><p>
  <strong>The Red Talons: </strong>
</p><p>One of the two main Iron Hands successor chapters, the Red Talon, like the one Iron Warriors successor chapter, the Hammers of Olympia, is a Crusading chapter loyal to a fleet.. It has attained a tenth of Legion size, and in spite of being the chapter that attacked Mars and brought on the schism has managed to heal and to find a modus vivendi the wounds opened in a way that the Iron Hands did not. Thus, ironically, the chapter founded by the disreputable and controversial Autek Mor, which was considered the most divergent and unwelcome of the Iron Hands, retains the relationship with its parent chapter that Mor had with Ferrus Manus in life. </p><p>Alone among the forces associated with the Iron Hands, the Talons have the fuller panoply of connection with the Mechanicus, including associated Forge Worlds and Titanicus Legion allies, as well as adaptations specializing in both boarding starships and orbital bombardment at a skill to match the Warmaster's own Legion. Equally distinctly they not only retain the kind of autocratic structure that the Legion-era Clan companies possessed, but the Chapter Master of the Red Talons for all practical purposes operates with the kind of power wielded by a high ranking officer of the Legion, instead of the more informal and situational power possessed by Iron Hands chapter masters and leaders.</p><p>Amplifying this by their rigid adherence to the old Heresy-era Creed of Iron, the Red Talons see the iron Hands as little better than heretics who abandoned the paths taught to them by their father, while the Iron Hands see the Red Talons as an atavism preserving memories of a father who did not respect them or their chapter master in any event. Uniquely among successors of the First Founding, the Red Talons have never responded to any appeals for aid in the few times that the Iron Hands have bothered to issue them, and have never sent one in reverse.</p><p>
  <strong>The Fists of Iron: </strong>
</p><p>After the Sapphire King War in M37, Medusa was wracked by civil war in M38 with the Fists of Iron on the losing side and expelled by the Iron Hands from Medusa, and their clan company erased from both the lists of the Iron Hands and the clans that provided warriors to the company eradicated in the only time that the Red Talons and the Iron Hands are said to have collaborated. The Fists of Iron are rumored to have had ties to the Necron Overlord Orikan the Diviner, as their modifications by the standards of the Creed of Iron are said to resemble the Necrodermis hands of Ferrus Manus. The most renegade of all chapters connected to a First Founding chapter, and the most obscure, the Fists of Iron, like the Legion of the Damned, have an uncanny knowledge of where and how to strike when the Imperium needs them most, and a great and deep hatred of Orks and Eldar, with the hatred one that's mutual. </p><p>Many of the most recent great victories of the Imperium over Orks and Eldar Craftworlds have come from the Fists of Iron, whether or not they have adapted variants of Gauss Weaponry has been alleged by the Blackwatch, but not confirmed by outside sources. As with the Iron Hands and unlike the Red Talons, the Fists of Iron eschew the Mechanicus and are self-reliant, though their technology has unknown origin and nature.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Index Astartes, VII Legion Imperial Fists:</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Once one of the most noble Legions of the Imperium, descendants of the master of Inwit, the Imperial Fists fell due to the Pain Glove and Rogal Dorn's anger at the choice of Perturabo as Praetorian and how he sought to make himself more worthy in the eyes of the Emperor. Now a Chaos Undivided Legion on Medrengard, the Fists and their Master are aware that they were never the first choice of Chaos, and seek to burn the Galaxy in resentment of being second to a Legion they despise.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>One of the cruelest ironies of the Heresy is that the VII Legion, once the rivals of the Iron Warriors, not only fell to Chaos but fell in a manner that none could have predicted. Perturabo, following his selection as Praetorian of Terra, retained a deep respect for Dorn as a man even as the two were among the most bitter and even vicious rivals among the Legions. Where the Lord of Iron despised the Luna Wolf and believed him unworthy of a position that his rebellion was held to vindicate, he seemed deeply troubled by the knowledge not only of Dorn's betrayal, but the rivalry that emerged from that. From the stoic sons of stone to an Undivided Legion that sees itself as a rival to the Bearers of the Word and the Thousand Sons, the fall of the Fists opened the same mirror to the sons of Olympia that the Night Lords dd to the Raven Guard. The Iron Warriors stared into an abyss and did not like what they saw. </strong>
</p><p><strong>Origins: </strong>Rogal of House Dorn was the VII Primarch, the sixth found, and when he was found he was master of an empire of a hundred stars, the Empire of Inwit. From his resources he had built a ship, the <em>Phalanx, </em>that was a match for <em>The Vengeful Spirit </em>and the <em>Bucephalus </em>and its successor <em>The Imperator Somnium. </em>Dorn spent much of the Crusade among the most lauded and revered of Primarchs and in that time was revered more than the Iron Warriors. Indeed, the course and history of both Legions during the Crusade would have seemed to argue that if Chaos had selected a Legion to fall, it was the legion of the Warmaster, which was led by a dour and paranoid figure who had introduced himself to his Legion by having 3,500 of its soldiers decimated after the Incaladion campaign, and whose way of war was stoic and brutal and marked by mathematics. The Fists in their golden armor made greater use of firepower and flexibility and won victories with a fraction of the cost, even if in the jaundiced eyes of Perturabo often using the Iron Warriors as allies to absorb bullets that the Fists avoided only because another Legion took them in their stead.</p><p>For all this, Dorn was no true friend of other Primarchs, Konrad Curze, one of his nominal allies, nearly murdered him on one joint campaign during the Crusade. Dorn and the Khan had the least friendly relationship of any Primarchs, and the two Legions' meetings at Prospero and in the flight of the Khan to Terra likewise amplified the rivalry between them. Even Horus was at least at times prone to abrasive relationships with a Primarch who was rigidly and stoically honest and not the least bit concerned for the volatile feelings of brothers far less in rigid control of their emotions than he was. Dorn was a superb warrior with many gifts, and yet he counterbalanced this by addiction to a device of Inwit's making called the pain glove. He immersed himself in it to let himself <em>feel. </em>It was called a glove because its shape took the form of a massive clenched fist not unlike his Legion's sigil, but the shape of it was as a pool of greenish water, Dorn sometimes emerging from it still younger than his already ageless face indicated and in a frenzy that did not settle readily.</p><p>It was in the wake of one such frenzy, where Dorn attacked Leman Russ, who for a change was the Primarch attacked instead of the one that did the attacking with his eyes retaining the glow of the Glove, that Dorn's career entered a sudden change. The glove, which had been a secret of his Legion with each sub-chapter having a smaller one of its own,was discovered and Dorn was brought to Terra for questions by Malcador the Sigilite. With news of the potential purge of the XVII Legion in the air, it was deemed impolitic to consider purging a fourth as well as a third Legion, but it did mean that the Imperial Fists were now subject to a new scrutiny that they did not welcome.</p><p>With the revelation that an otherwise near-flawless Legion had a device similar to a half-mythical concept of Old Earth that was never proven to exist outside sequentialist concepts prior to the full emergence of Psykers, the star of the Fists began to ebb and that of the dour and unpleasant Iron Warriors began to rise, less from first choice and more from the reality that if the Fists were not considered welcome to guard the gates of Terra, only the Iron Warriors could. To the surprise of everyone, including the Iron Warriors themselves, the sons of distant and stoic Olympia proved more than worthy of the task of being the Praetorians of the Emperor, called from their vast garrisons and their diffused presence among the stars to the Emperor's side.</p><p>Dorn, who shared with Lorgar the ignominy that his keeping the particular secret he had had brought him disgrace in the eyes of the Emperor, was informed in the last half-century of the Crusade of the existence of new and secret power and knowledge in the Warp, knowledge that Lorgar promised could bring him renewed favor in the Emperor's eyes and even give him a means to kick the addiction to the Pain Glove that had intensified with the knowledge that the frenzy that had seen him nearly murder the Lord of Winter and War had done more damage to his ascension than anything else.</p><p>It was this exploration of the Warp as a new weapon and set of knowledge to master that began the spiraling change of the Fists, whose stoic personalities meant that none of the Four specifically could or would appeal to them, and that instead they became as much an unaffiliated as an unaligned Legion. All of the sons of the Emperor had shares of gifts in the Psychic arts, and Dorn was no different to his brothers in this. As the Iron Warriors began an unexpected rise in the Emperor's favor and honor, up to the point of Perturabo being present at Ullanor where Dorn was prosecuting a vicious and bitter war against a Chaos-afflicted set of Xenos where his first larger-scale experiments with the Warp permitted him to win a gruesome victory, the rivalry with Perturabo that had ever weighed more heavily on the older Primarch's mind than the younger began to see a switch in mentalities.</p><p>Peturabo made his level best effort to overcome deeper failings of his, an effort that would only ever be partially successful, and Dorn, influenced by the slow and steady rise in Warp power and the changes in his mindset, began to display a paranoid envy and seeing slights in his brother's actions where, in a cruel irony, Perturabo was trying in a partial and not very well considered way to try to bridge things. Even then, with the legacy of the old feud and the degree to which the Warmaster would never fully ascend over his flaws (and indeed, Dorn siding openly with Horus brought the feud back into fuller nature and made clear that the changes had been Perturabo aspiring to be a Praetorian for the entire Imperium) the efforts did not succeed and created a deeper rift.</p><p>By the time of Isstvan, the Lord of Inwit had become the Stone King, a figure who had delved into the arts of Chaos enough to create Golems, a kind of specialized Warp-ridden artificial life made not of metal but of stone, supremely resilient and beginning to wield them in the kind of vicious devil may care about how many died to achieve a goal fashion he believed was Perturabo's way to wage war (in truth the Lord of Iron cared very deeply....about stastistical margins. Those fortunate enough to be without were cared for deeply, those who were not were not). The Stone King personally dueled the Lord of Drakes during the Dropsite Massacre, wounding him and impaling him, believing him dead and marching into the ranks of his armies.</p><p>The Stone King was also involved in the ascension of Fulgrim to Daemon Primarch and what is believed to have been an attempt by the Phoenician to offer up the Stone King that led to permanent bad blood between the VII and III Legions that endures to this day in the Eye of Terror. Dorn was too stubborn a bulwark to be overcome by a scheme of Chaos-corrupted Eldar and the Emperor's Children, and his Legion emerged from this still more Warp-reliant than before, waging a vicious attrition battle on Tallarn, and finally rising to the task of overseeing the assault on Perturabo's fortifications on Terra.</p><p>In the purely mechanical sense the arts of Olympia, nurtured in a crueler logic for a crueler age that viewed humanity as disposable but tried to soften this by offering them as martyrs for the Lectitio Divinitatus and against foes to whom death was better than captivity, proved better than the purely mechanical arts of Inwit, but Inwit did not come against Olympia with machinery alone. Against Dorn's mastery of the Warp and of Warp technology, the Iron Warriors were not able to meet that challenge in the manner to which they were accustomed, by reliance on the Imperial Truth. It was this confrontation in the Siege of Terra that led to the first true awakening of belief in the Legion that never fully embraced it, Warsmith Volk rising to become the first of the Emperor's Champions.</p><p>Such dreadful Chaos Lords as Sigismund the World-Destroyer, Demetrius the Besieger, and Archamus the Annihilator made their presences known. Alexius Pollux, the survivor of the Siege of Lesser Damantyne and hero of Imperium Secundus, was one of the most famous of the loyalist Imperial Fists, of which no small amount of their number served in the war, the largest of any of the Traitor Legions. Many among them had come to see their father's dabbling in Warp science as proof of something rotten, and to their surprise both the lords of Ultramar and of Olympia proved more welcoming than they had any reason to expect.</p><p>The former line Legionary Lysander, and Chapter Master Koorland, are others of the most famous loyalist Imperial Fists, Lysander one of the founding members of the Grey Knights and Koorland one of Perturabo's main advisors, and the last legacy of the regret on the part of the Lord of Iron and his own later belief that his feud with Dorn had done much to drive his brother, whom part of him still respected highly even in the time of the Siege, into the ranks of Chaos. By the time Perturabo came to this belief and sought to  truly make himself free himself of resentment and hatred that had been one-sided, it was too little and too late and both Legions were drawn into the Maelstrom of the Iron Cage, a Chaos-saturated construct that sought to crush the Iron Warriors and to corrupt them, to bring the Chaos Gods their original choice among the Siege-reliant Primarchs.</p><p>The Cage was the most sore trial of the Iron Warriors since the War with the Hrud, and it forced a reshaping of the Legion and of its values that had it been done a half-century earlier might have prevented much else that came with it. It marked the ascension and transformation of Dorn into a powerful Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided, a sorcerer-king who unique among the Traitor Primarchs remained one of the most active besides the Daemon Primarch Angron, destroying the Forge world of Toil with a Nurgle Plague,  personally commanding the VII Legion in the Tenth Black Crusade, and leading detachments of it out of the Eye of Terror.</p><p>Among the Traitor Legions the sons of the Stone King remain the most intact, moreso than their closest competitors for this title the Death Guard. They retain the name Imperial Fists for the same reason that the Emperor's Children retained that name, as a gesture of contempt and a taunt for the loyalist servants of the Emperor. They endorse the blessings of Chaos as the Ruinous Powers bestow them, the eldest and most powerful of the Imperial Fists like Sigismund the World-Destroyer vessels of the Four Gods whose power in a smaller sense is a mirror of the Despoiler, hence the Imperial Fists being the most distant of the Traitor Legions and Sigismund one of Abaddon's greatest rivals, and no more loyal to Lorgar Aurelian as Everchosen.</p><p>And yet, as on Iydris, where Rogal Dorn had learned from the mouth of Slaanesh xirself that he was never the first choice for a Siege Primarch, that it had always been Perturabo whose every day was haunted by the sight and judgment of the Eye and yet he had overcome it, that Dorn's masochistic releases had damned him when he had let himself release the volcanic fury heeless of whom it was released against, the Fists are haunted by a harsh truth. They who were above the Iron Warrriors in the old days became second in the sight of the Imperium, and of Chaos, and in the effort to become First, Chaos has driven to them a snare no different than that for Fabius Bile of the Emperor's Children or Azhek Ahriman of the Thousand Sons.</p><p>Ever shall the Fists chase to be First in the sight of Chaos, and in nn exercise to achieve that which Chaos will never grant, ever deeper shall they become architects of their own damnation. And each time they indulge in the Pain Glove to try to mitigate the trap, Chaos sinks its fangs in them ever more deeply.</p><p>
  <strong>Beliefs: </strong>
</p><p>Since the Clash of Wolf and Stone, the Imperial Fists have adapted a Chaos creed unlike that of any other Traitor Legion. Unlike the Thousand Sons or the Bearers of the Word, they do not worship Chaos, seeing it as a weapon among other weapons. Unlike the Black Legion, they actively endorse and seek the blessings of the Four Gods and of such spirits of Undivided Chaos as Drach'nyen, Bela'kor, and the location and power of the Warp essence known as the Well of Souls. Chaos to them is a science like any other, in a fashion not unlike that of Fabius Bile, a science of souls and bones and blood, but a science all the same. Unlike the Thousand Sons they do not speak of cults but have libraries dedicated to an attempt at scientific mastery of the Imperium. Among the forces of Chaos they are most aware of the ways in which history diverged, and haunted by the prospect that it was their fate to have been the Praetorians at the walls of Terra, not the sons of Olympia and its Empire, but they see in this a sign that they in the end proved unworthy, and that in the fires of their scientific grasp of the Warp they shall tear down the works of the sons of Olympia and in that process show themselves worthier than any other force. </p><p>Unlike Horus, Lorgar, and Abaddon, Dorn does not actively seek the patronage of the Four, instead believing that the Four need material flesh to work in, and that his power to focus himself in the temporal world means that his flesh is less corruptible than that of his brothers. In a sharp irony, Dorn is correct to believe this, for the Emperor had worked in him a power to still the Warp by his presence, the closest thing that a Psyker could come to duplicating the effects of a Blank. It means that Dorn has grown to twice his size and gained a second face on the side of his first, but otherwise in ten thousand years in the Chaos-saturated and corrupted force of the Eye remained far less changed than his children, who have become embodiments of Warp power to match or exceed the Word Bearers or the Chaos-spawn that the Flesh-changed Thousand Sons became.</p><p>Dorn's children, depending on which band, do defy their father's creed and actively court the worship of the Four, the habit of Sigismund in particular of doing this famously led Dorn to denounce him as not his son at all, which led Sigismund further down the path and to become his father's great rival within the Fists. Sigismund has also taken in a mirror of Abaddon and in a deliberate gesture of provocation to having armor of black, though he is not a member of the Black Legion and every bit as much a rival of the Black Legion as he is of his father's works.</p><p>None of the rest of Dorn's sons have gone as far as Sigismund the World-Destroyer, but none likewise match his career of successes and his destruction of loyalist Astartes and servants of the Imperium alike. Of all Chaos Lords, Sigismund is among the most feared, and feared for good reasons. Where the Black Crusades of the Despoiler have had limited results or outright failure, Sigismund remains undefeated bar the collapse of the Heresy, and there the defeat in truth was that of the Sons of Horus, whose leadership chose to retreat and in that moment the other Traitor Legions followed them.</p><p>All Fists use the Pain Glove, a pool of greenish water, to retain not simply youth but their most idealized and abstract concepts of themselves. Only the loyalist Fists of the Heresy abandoned the practice and in doing so showed that the Glove itself was an innately corrupting influence on the Legion.</p><p>
  <strong>Organization: </strong>
</p><p>The Fists are located on the vast fortress-world of Medrengard, a Daemon-world of unusual solidity within the Eye of Terror. For this reason also it's one of the worlds most densely populated by the Lost and the Damned, and in the wake of the death of the Daemon Primarch Angron in the War for the Dominion of Fire, has become the new homeworld of the last of the World Eaters, minus Kharn the Betrayer. Alone among the Traitor Legions their organizational structure is nearly intact from the Heresy, the Primarch with his Huscarls forming the elite of the Legion, various Chapters led by Chapter Masters....and the Templars of Ruin led by Sigismund the World-Destroyer, whose world of Muspili serves as the base for his quasi-successor chapter. </p><p>The <em>Phalanx</em>, too, continues its service, now as much a Daemon world subject purely to the whim of Rogal Dorn and none other, a terrible blight and abomination exceeded only by the Chaos-saturated Vengeful Spirit. In some ways it too is now a Battle-Brother in the Legion as much as a fortress from which the Fists seek to wage war, and its presence as the August Darkling Star in a void war has marked a time of great sorrows for the Imperium.</p><p>The Dark Mechanicum has some of its deepest ties with the Imperial Fists, who have developed creative horrors in the <em>Phalanx</em> and Medrengard to match any in the shadowy realm of Cormorragh, including modifications of the principle of the Pain Glove that serve as akin to an Iron Maiden and as torture devices to corrupt mortals. Unlike other Chaos Marines the Fists will regularly raid Imperial and Xenos space for slaves, having a particular fondness for Eldar and Orks for the task.</p><p>
  <strong>Structure: </strong>
</p><p>In many ways due to retaining a nearly intact Heresy-era structure the Fists are an atavism showcasing elements of what the Old Legions resembled. The Primarch functions as both spiritual and strategic leader, able to take a role in the field or from a distance, as wished. His will is implemented by the Huscarls, twenty-one lords of the Fists, of whom Archamus the Annihilator is the most loyal and faithful of all of them and very much an extension of Dorn's will. The Legion itself is divided among chapters, which are equivalents to corps, and detachments, which are equivalents to divisions. It has a focus on both void war and siege tools, with a logistical skill to match and exceed anything of the other Traitor Legions, including the Black Legion. </p><p>In most respects the Fists are almost like more 'regular' Astartes, save that their endorsement of Chaos marks them as unambiguously among the most vile and dangerous enemies humanity has ever faced. The Imperial Fists do have one extra element that makes them stand out among the Traitor Legions, the largest concentration of Obliterators among the Traitor Legions, and these walking arsenals of Chaos corrupted power are the closest thing to those worshiped and revered among the Legion the way the Gal Vorbak and other Unburdened are among the Bearers of the Word. An element that makes them stand out among the Traitor Legions as well is that there are no Imperial Fists Dreadnoughts. Those too badly wounded to live allow themselves corruption by the Neverborn and are considered martyrs for the Pantheon.</p><p>
  <strong>The Templars of Ruin: </strong>
</p><p>The singular FIsts successor chapter, of sorts, the Templars of Ruin match the Crimson Corsairs as aspirants to lead the Traitor Astartes. Their chapter master Sigismund the World-Destroyer was once the most zealous and faithful of Rogal Dorn's sons, focused on loyalty to the Imperium and to his master, in that order. When the Fists collectively stumbled in the sight of the Imperium, Sigismund underwent a crisis of faith deepened by the pall cast first by Isstvan and then by the bloody Battle of Phall where Warsmith Idriss Krendl outfought the Fists at their own game due to their expecting Warsmith Harkor, who was killed in the first shots of the battles, and being slow to adjust their campaign to the foe they were facing. </p><p>In the Battle of Iydris when Rogal Dorn had nearly been murdered and sacrificed to Slaanesh by Fulgrim in an act that drove him to the final stages of his ambitions within the Warp and to full rise as the Stone King, Sigismund found his new creed and began to seek to welcome the idea not merely of service to one God, but to all of the Four Gods of Ruin. Empowered and blessed in his own ways, he was soon moved by the Four from his father's side, when Dorn declared him no longer his son, to that of Horus Lupercal, to whom he filled as a much more loyal ally the void left by the Faceless One who had challenged the Warmaster in the wake of Signus Prime.</p><p>Father and son reconciled in the bloody Battle for the Saturnine Wall, when Dorn saved Sigismund from the wrath of the Lord of Iron, but it was a reconciliation that did not repair a rift that in any event had become insuperable.</p><p>In the wake of the Heresy, Sigismund began a career of his own as an independent Chaos Lord and one of the main rivals of the Despoiler, architect of Black Crusades of his own, and in his own view more loyal to the Gods than the Despoiler, seeing Abaddon as a coward who aspired to the power of the Pantheon but not to the price taken to get there. In the wake of the Despoiler's fall, Sigismund the World-Destroyer has placed his services as the replacement of the slain Erebus and Kor Phaeron, linking the second most powerful soldier of Chaos Undivided with the Primarch of same, and in this union the Galaxy faces its most formidable foes since Horus Lupercal's march on Terra.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Index Astartes XII Legion, World Eaters:</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The broken Hounds of Nuceria, the World Eaters, share an ignominy with the Alpha Legion and the Black Legion. Their Primarch, Angron, was broken in the War for the Dominion of Fire/the Second War of Armageddon. In the wake of first Skalathrax and then the fall of Angron, the XII Legions are the bitter last sons of a dying breed, slipping into the ranks of Daemon-Princes of Khorne. The Traitor Astartes who have both the most and the least to lose, theirs is a fate against which even the fate of the Emperor's Children looks pleasant, by comparison.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Established in the transition point between the Unity and the Great Crusade as the War Hounds, the XII Legion was established as a force of annihilation. While its roots are lost to ten thousand years of mythology and to the memories (marred by complete disinterest in and contempt from) of the Warmaster of the Imperium, the original War Hounds waged disciplined wars of extermination that began with the destruction of the last of the Thunder Warriors. Then, late in the Crusade, with but three quarters of a century left to it, the Primarch Angron was found on the world of Nuceria. Within a decade the War Hounds had become the Eaters of Worlds, one of the most bloodthirsty and terrifying of the Legions. In the Heresy they were active, waging the Shadow Crusade, terrorizing Imperial worlds after its fall to sustain the existence of the Daemon Primarch Angron, ascended in the Battle of Nuceria. After the Heresy and the Breaking of Skalathrax, the Legion was drawn back together by its Primarch, who embraced it for the first time as a Daemon in a way he never had as a man. The destruction of Angron in his clash with the Emperor in the War of the Dominion of Fire has brought the XII Legion to become, in a grim irony none of its remaining leaders appreciate, to be the Legion closest in spirit and nature to the Aeldari, a slow decline into an inevitable extinction where the only survival that endures is plunging themselves utterly into the maw of the Warp and the hell-god that has claimed them all. </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Origin: </strong>
</p><p>Formed in the wake of the Unity with a core including the old Tupelov Lancers of the Unification Wars, the XII Legion's first major deployment was a rebellion on the asteroid-prison of Cerberus. Forged in the wake of the initial conquests and unity with the Mechanicum, the Cerberus Prison had taken, unknowingly, a major deployment of the II Legion of Thunder Warriors, the Stormcasts. Renaming themselves the Dai'Tar, they orchestrated a mass rebellion, the very first in the history of the Crusade. With them were several of the genetically enhanced soldiers of Ursh and of the Pan-Pacific Empire, the Cosszhaki and the Mamluks. The XII Legion overcame them all in one of the first and bloodiest battles of its kind in the Crusade. They sustained five to one losses against the Thunder Warriors and the last servants of Kalagann and Dume, but in that triumph not only earned their name of War Hounds but distinguished themselves with the inexorable rolling tide of the Phalanx. </p><p>This set the pattern for the XII Legion, a force already infamous and marked as the Foebane of the Emperor's enemies.</p><p>And then late in the Crusade, one of the last Primarchs discovered, only Corax and (perhaps) Alpharius discovered after him, was found on the world of Nuceria, a hellish place in the realm of Ultramar. It was one of the only human worlds that serves as a mirror of the shadowy hellish realm of Cormorragh, where the Eldar Archons rule a hellscape of willful torment and gladiator games. There, the young Primarch Angron was enslaved, given the terrible implant known as the Butcher's Nails, and made a gladiator who eventually broke out of the imprisonment, and faced armies that included a surprisingly high amount of Dark Age of Technology-era weaponry, with forces that had primitive agricultural and gladiator equipment.</p><p>Nuceria burned but the fear of the Gladiator-King led them to call upon a weapon of last resort, the Metal Men, likewise bonded by the terrible ancient technology of that place. The Emperor retrieved Angron, then, and in a decision that mystified both savants and even the Warmaster Perturabo, whose perusal of the backgrounds of his brothers in Imperial Archives during the Heresy as one of the means to pass the few bits of free time he had, chose to let the Eaters of Cities die and to take Angron as master of the World Eaters. In later years, it would become clear that the Emperor had given the last full measure of strength to seek to free his son, considering the ultimate measure of creating a new cloned body and transferring the Primarch's soul to it.</p><p>The last phases of wars with great Ork empires that marked the path to the Ullanor Crusade meant the plan went into abeyance and the Eaters of Worlds began their degeneration into the warlike and savage marauders whose actions scarred the Galaxy. The result was that Angron would be drawn into the Heresy early on, revealing his rebellion against the Imperium with the atrocity on Isstvan III and in the Dropsite Massacre. During the Horus Heresy, the XII Legion and the XVII Legion dealt major wounds to the Empire of Ultramar in the Shadow-Crusade, detachments remaining during the shadowy epoch where the XIII Legion, along with half the I and all of the IX Legion disappeared behind the storm.</p><p>Angron ascended in the Battle of Nuceria, becoming a Daemon Primarch of Khorne. The second Primarch to ascend after his brother Fulgrim. Angron would create a first Dominion of Fire during the heresy, vast skull towers sustaining his material essence following a falling out between the Bearers of the Word and the Eaters of Worlds and his brother Lorgar seeking to grant him space and time to massacre rather than risking a fragile brotherhood. During the Heresy Angron was the second traitor Primarch to make planetfall, would fight his brother Sanguinius the Archangel of Baal, and would be beaten before his Legion in a clash that heavily wounded Sanguinius.</p><p>The Blood Angel had fully expected to die in the Vengeful Spirit, his wounds amplifying the rest of the sorrows in facing Horus when his brother Perturabo took actions that altered the course of history. During the early Legion Wars, Angron abandoned his sons once more, and they were plunged into a bitter confrontation with the III Legion, fresh from a defeat at the hands of the Black Legion on Harmony. In this clash Kharn the Betrayer destroyed the III Legion as an organized entity and dealt a wound that endured for eight thousand years to the XII Legion, and in the process ascending to become the greatest of all the World Eaters and the last, best hope of the Legion in the wake of the fall of Angron.</p><p>Eight thousand years later the bulk of the XII Legion was assembled by the Primarch Angron, who erupted into the Materium and, around the world of Armageddon, built a vast empire known as the Dominion of Fire. Here, directly, the Emperor of Mankind himself would take the field to at last confront his son and give him the final reckoning that Angron had craved since the Emperor had taken him into the belly of the <em>Adamant Resolve. </em></p><p>------</p><p>
  <em>The world of Armageddon burned, in parts, but mostly had a sick charnel house smell to it. The very material fabric of the universe had become a hellscape of a sea of blood with mountains. The Imperator Somnium had broken into the fearsome bone-shields erected over the Dominion as a result of the sorcery on behalf of the Blood God, the might of the Anathema boosted by millennia of active worship and the power of Faith combining to make the servants of Chaos know fear. The lesser daemons of Khorne did something very unusual in any other context, they fled back to the Warp screaming '</em>
  <strong>The Sun Rises, the Sun Rises!' </strong>
  <em>while the greater remained present, awaiting a battle to end all battles. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not even the Ruinous Powers of the Warp could prevent the Emperor and his Companions descending from the sky by teleportation. The legions of the Warp surged forward first, the remaining great ones intent on facing the Companions, Valdor and the Emperor fighting side by side as they had on many battlefields before the Heresy and on others after. Before the might and the light of the Emperor even the greater Daemons of Khorne were broken or disintegrated into ash, and around his presence the Khorne-induced changes in the world reverted it to what it had been. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>A vast and towering behemoth, a thing of brass and reddish flesh, rage made manifest, the vast Nails that had become both mane and hair extending behind two vast horns of obsidian. </em>
</p><p>
  <strong>Father, </strong>
  <em>the Daemon Primarch Angron spoke. A single word, a word of malice to a point that even the Companions found themselves made to halt, the wrath of the fallen Primarch not allowing them near their King. <br/></em>
</p><p>
  <strong>++Angron, my son++ </strong>
  <em>the Emperor spoke, and in His voice there was genuine grief. </em>
  <strong>++Of all the things that I have regretted most, and of all reminders of my limitations, what has become of you is among the greatest.++</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Regrets, Father? From the slavemaster of Terra who made sport of a world and then a Galaxy? Who found a son with carving knives in his brain and left him to become this?</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>At that word the Daemon's paw slammed against the metal of its breastplate. </em>
</p><p>
  <strong>I am your failure made manifest!</strong>
</p><p>++<strong>You are right, my son, and for that I have only regret in turn. ++</strong> <em>Rage, true rage, not the artificial ones of the Nails or of Khorne, filled Angron at those words. For a brief moment in time with the golden lord facing him, it was the Emperor's son, not the thing he had become, that gazed at him in wrath.</em></p><p>
  <strong>++You wanted to die, my son, and I did not let you. The needs of the Crusade outweighed justice. Now. here, you and I. I can decide your fate, and grant you the peace that I did Horus.++ </strong>
</p><p><strong>You lie,</strong><em> the Daemon Primarch growled.</em> <strong>I do not get hope, I do not deserve it</strong>. </p><p><em>The Emperor shook his head, a simple and entirely human gesture.</em> <strong>++You like all my sons are beings of light at the core. If I had had the time and the great Ork empires had not intruded, you would have been saved then. Now there is only this.++ </strong></p><p>
  <em>The dull sword of the Emperor erupted into a brilliant fire that drew a howl of pain from the Primarch, who launched his own daemonic sword against it. The sword of darkness and blood slammed against the brilliant blade of light and of humanity's hopes and dreams. The Godsword of Khorne shattered, the fragments exploding outward and falling as droplets of blood as Angron stared in bemusement at the ruins of his sword. Hurling himself at his father he found himself dealt four great wounds with the blade, one to each of his limbs, and fell to his knees.</em>
</p><p>
  <strong>++I will not ask your forgiveness, my son, for too much has happened and there can be no forgiveness for atrocities as have been dealt by both sides. Instead, I grant you the peace and the ending you have long sought.++ </strong>
</p><p>
  <em>Armageddon held its breath and even the Warp seemed stilled for a moment, in the spheres of the Blood God where the Brass Tower dwelt. It was a moment within moments and by the time the servants of Khorne moved to try to prevent things power built up in the Emperor, the power that had obliterated the creatures of Gorro and in other visions had destroyed the soul of the Primarch Horus Lupercal, Arch-Traitor. The Blood Plains became what they had been, if charred to ashes, and in that brilliant flare of god-light a Primarch died with a smile on his face and two sentences spoken that haunted his Legion thereafter:</em>
</p><p>
  <strong>Asti, Labadon, my brothers and sisters, I come to you! I die free! </strong>
</p><p><em>And then there was ashes, the Primarch Angron no more and with him Armageddon's Warp influence began to unravel, the XII Legion drawn in a bloody maelstrom that opened in the sky with a look of broken despair pervading it. Of all its champions only Kharn had been absent from Armageddon.</em> </p><p>------</p><p>The death of the Primarch Angron and his erasure altered the XII Legion, the core of the Legion deciding that if it was to die, it would aspire to die with recreating as much of the ideals of the old brotherhood of the War Hounds as the corruption of Khorne would allow them to sustain. This core, some 25,000 Astartes, is the most formidable single army dedicated to Khorne, and where it moves even the most powerful of the Imperium's forces tremble. The rest of the surviving Legion from the Dominion of Fire has broken into a set of eight successor bands, and Kharn the Betrayer, who is a Legion in his own right and one of the most fearsome of all champions of Chaos. With the fall of Angron and the obliteration of his soul, Kharn has found himself becoming a new totem to a Legion that he despised when he was an Astarte during the Heresy, and the core of a new devotion based on Khorne, with Angron both mourned and avenged, depending.</p><p>
  <strong>Structure:</strong>
</p><p>For the last two millennia, the last of the XII Legion have remained solidly at 25,000, a quarter of their original strength in the Heresy era. Led by Legion Master Gazharek Skurn, the Legion fully assembles only on occasion of Blood Crusades, following the call to the Skull Arena where the greatest champions of each of its Skulltaker levies contest with each other, the winner becoming one of the Council of Blood that runs the Legion. World Eaters Skulltaker bands vary drastically, the smallest at eight hundred, the largest at nine thousand. They have the smallest armor and artillery arsenals of any major Traitor Legion, but due to the influence of Khorne that has only exacerbated after the death of Angron on Armageddon, they do not need it. </p><p>Where the XII Legion manifests from Warp rifts or from capturing vessels of loyal Legions and transforming them into Hellships tied to the Blood God, its aura of blood and death has magnified with its Soul Harvests carrying waves of mass doom with it. The old Legion flagship, the <em>Conqueror, </em>and its ascended Daemon, another female Daemon Princess of Khorne, Lotarra the Steel-Souled, returned from the Warp after the fall of Angron to draw with it the Legion, and is the singular ship of the old Legion that has not only endured but grown in its power. The spirit of the Steel-Souled slakes itself on the blood of the dead and the dying, and the former Legion is only too happy to retain the memory of the old Legion in one of the sole traces left to it.</p><p>The XII Legion structure is the most infantry-reliant of all the Astartes forces, and in a paradoxical sense superficially light infantry with few Terminators. In practice, too, there is a higher proportion of Possessed Astartes outside of any Legion bar the Word Bearers, some portions of World Eaters warbands almost entirely possessed Astartes save one or two among the ranks.</p><p>An exception to this otherwise-absent reliance on heavy firepower is the highest concentration of Khornate Daemon Titans of any of the Legions, even moreso than the Imperial Fists. These quasi-organic monsters provide both firepower and totems to the Legion, sometimes even serving as troop transports for the memorable sight of the Traitor-Fall where the Legionaries drop from the greater Titans and in full power of their terrible god rise, sometimes coated in their own blood and injuries and heal their injuries with the fate of others.</p><p>At times the Legion, in small portions and in its entirety has served as mercenaries for other Chaos Lords, caring no more than their gory god from whence the blood flows, only that it flows.</p><p>
  <strong>Kharn the Betrayer: </strong>
</p><p>Once the Equerry to Angron and the ninth of the Legion's captains to approach the Primarch in his first rage where he murdered eight of them (and in this there was a sense of the future casting a cruel shadow before it that was missed much as with the XVII Legion), Kharn spent time in the Crusade as a hero of the Imperium to match Sigismund and Marius Gage and Jubal Khan, and Ezekyle Abaddon. In the wake of the Battle of Nuceria he took his first steps to ascension along the Eightfold Path just as his Primarch became the son of the Blood God. His path to ascension was fixed at Skalathrax, where the last traces of Kharn of Terra disappeared and the Chaos Lord known as Kharn the Betrayer's infamy was writ across the Eye. </p><p>A greater focus of the favor of Khorne than his Primarch, Kharn is called by other Chaos bands and Chaos Lords only with great fear or great malice (and only occasionally and very occasionally at that is he called upon more than once by the same person). The massacre at Skalathrax was the last time that the father and the son would see each other, Angron deeming his son anathema and only embracing his Legion once Kharn had offered so much of it and of the Emperor's Children to the Blood God. And yet for all that distance, it is said that in the aftermath of the death and obliteration of Angron at Armageddon that Kharn entered the materium and offered the skulls of an entire world conquered by the XII Legion, the world of Furiosa, to Khorne single-handedly, and that his motivation for doing so was grief for a distant father across long lines of bitterness and sorrow that could never fully be healed.</p><p>In the last two millennia leading up to the Rhana Dandra, Kharn has become in a sense less the Legion Master of the XII and more its totem, invoked in the ways that Angron would have been after his ascension. In the name of Kharn the surviving mass of the old XII Legion now wages war, and wages it in a stoic and yet frenzied fashion, as dangerous to their nominal allies as to their enemies.</p><p>
  <strong>Great War Bands:  </strong>
</p><p>The Eight Great War Bands are the successors to the World Eaters, in a loose sense, the groups that splintered off of the greater Legion. They vary greatly in size and in structure, the Kings of the Arena, founded by the World Eater Daemon Prince Delvarus, the largest at ten thousand. It is a miniature Legion in its own right, the greatest coherent force dedicated to Khorne among Legionaries outside the remnant XII Legion itself. Delvarus, once the greatest pit-fighter of the old Legion and ascended to Daemon Prince in the wake of his offering eight hundred and eighty eight Emperor's Children skulls to Khorne after a vow to do so, built the new Legion in a paradoxical homage to the old War Hounds. </p><p>It has a paradoxical element of seeking to control the blessings of Khorne to grant a kind of deeper peace and serenity with the focus on a more monastic element that cultivates the art of combat as a scholarly endeavor. Delvarus sees in this pattern the means to offer a new path to Khorne distinct of most bands, and his is the one that attracts the largest subset of Khorne cultists among the Lost and the Damned, much larger than the World Eaters Legion itself. This control makes its warriors the more savage, for their fury is a tranquil singularity that draws all in its orbits and induces the berserker frenzies in their opponents, drawing them into combat that is its own offerings to the Blood God.</p><p>Next among them are the Avengers of Angron, who are a small but fearsomely dedicated group blending XII Legion, former Blackshields, and a few of the Black Legion who returned to their original Legion colors. A force totalling 1,600, they are the smallest of the Eight Great War Bands but have sought to directly target and fight the Emperor of Mankind himself, deeming the Master of Mankind not merely the False Emperor but the Kinslayer who must be destroyed. They have gone the furthest in a Khornate path to become an equivalent of the Gal Vorbak and Unburdened of the Word Bearers, and are among the few forces whose presence by itself guarantees the appearance of the Grey Knights to oppose them.</p><p>Next are the Valkia's Bloodsworn, loyal to a 'new' Daemon Princess of Khorne, one of the few indisputably feminine Khorne spirits. Valkia the Bloody, whose appearance disturbs Imperial Savants as a case of a brand new greater Daemon appearing as of nowhere, is said to have been a mortal of an unknown world or dimension whose ascension marked her being a kind of Bride of Khorne. Her Feasts, where she goes on a great hunt of skulls and is said to bring the choices portions of the dead to be devoured, make her one of the most fearsome totemic creatures of Khorne, and one endorsed to the fullest by her Astartes loyalists.</p><p>The other war bands have yet to make appearances outside of the Eye of Terror, and their appearances are looked to with a state of dread as the Rhana Dandra expands into the slow and inexorable end of the universe itself.</p><p>
  <strong>The Last Hounds: </strong>
</p><p>A single loyal battalion, led by Asharon Ares, one of the few World Eaters whose presence vanished out of memory around the time of Isstvan V when his forces had learned of his father's betrayal of his Legions and then was tossed through the pages of time by the Warp, appeared on Terra in the wake of the Maelstrom War. These were the last War Hounds, the last battalion-strength force that had refused the Nails altogether, not even their officers taking them. Alone among the XII Legion they retained the spirit, the brutal organized savagery of the old War Hounds that had reduced worlds to ashes and not a single survivor left. </p><p>A thousand War Hounds, the last sons of the old Legion, all of them to boot Terrans, have joined the forces of the Imperium in the wake of the Maelstrom War, sent along with the Warmaster's own forces to the planet Cadia, where the first stanza of the end of time looms, as Lorgar Aurelian, now the Everchosen in full, takes command of the Traitor Legions and Chaos forces and brings their full weight to bear against the planet.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Index Astartes, XIII Legion Ultramarines</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Once the greatest Legion by numbers in the time of the Great Crusade, the proud sons of Ultramar have fallen on harder times. While the Lord of Iron gave their gene-seed free access to create successor chapters, the death of their Primarch in the wake of his resurrection and fall to Khorne has led to a great crisis within the XIII Legion and indeed Ultramar, one building in the heart of the Imperium as the Emperor raises armies for the Maelstrom Crusade.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Constructed in the last days of the Unity from the remnants of peoples who gave their all to oppose it, the Legion originally known as the War-Born was one of the first of the Great Legions by size. Rivaled only by the I Legion and the IV Legion in sheer mass of manpower, the War-Born took part in the First Pacification of Luna. Upon reunion with their Primarch master of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, the XIII Legion became one of the greatest forces of the Heresy. During the Crusade and the Heresy, due to the then-prevailing custom among the Warmaster's Legion, the XIII Legion outnumbered the Iron Warriors due to the less bloodthirsty and brutal approaches of Primarch Guilliman. During the Heresy the XIII Legion were surprisingly absent as far as the eyes of Terra were concerned, even as they faced the Bearers of the Word and the World Eaters in the bloody Shadow Crusade. It was Roboute Guilliman's arrival at Terra at the van of a vast Crusader Host that relieved the Siege and led Horus to the foolish decision that ended in his being gunned down on the Vengeful Spirit. It was Guilliman who reforged the Imperium when his father slunk into the shadows lost in grief, or so it was said. </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>When Primarch Guilliman fell, the Schism came to Ultramar, and with it something that would present a grave threat to the Imperium, the gravest since the Badab War, and if anything a much greater threat than Huron Blackheart and his fall to Chaos. </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Origin: </strong>
</p><p>In the time of the Unity, the wars fought over five hundred years of bloody conquests and genocidal and xenocidal expansion from Terra to Luna and then to Mars, the Emperor of Mankind faced many peoples who put up a starch and determined resistance against the ideas of the Unity. It is the view of modern Imperial savants that these people did not understand the light of the Emperor, a view backed by a REDACTED REDACTED. From these shattered cultures, brought down by the full weight of the Thunder Legion and two of its Primarchs, the Primarchs of the II and XI Legions, a new detachment of Astartes was forged. It was these Terran War-Born who were the last of these cultures, and with the death of the Terran XIII Legion the last traces of these old stock of old Earth and humanity no longer existed. The War-Born were known to be a Legion with the kind of brutish reputation 'enjoyed' in later years by the sons of Medusa and of the old War Hounds in the time before the discovery of Primarch Angron. When they encountered their Primarch, however, the War-Born underwent one of the most profound transformations of any Legion. They had faced a terrible war with a Xenos breed known as the Osirian Psybrids. </p><p>The Psybrids are an unknown species of unknown origin in the time of the Great Crusade that brought great devastation to the Imperium, bringing about the defection of no less than three systems. By unknown means reliant on arcane Warp-tech, they brought about the death of the Legion Master, Lord Vosotho, and over a third of the XIII Legion. Losses equivalent to that of the VI Legion in the Wheel of Fire and the REDACTED in the REDACTED when the REDACTED fought and yet received the REDACTED. It was the Legion Master's Equerry, Marius Gage, who took a demoralized and nearly broken Legion, re-stitched it together, and led it to a great and terrible victory, one that left lasting scars on the Legion even after it met its Primarch. </p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>The following information known only to Ultramarines of Chapter Master level and beyond and to Imperial officials with Vermilion-level security clearances and above: </strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Osirian Psybrids represent an unusual throwback to a much earlier form of Chaos. Their legions appeared to straddle elements of the soulless creatures known as Necrons and those semi-legendary ancient manifestations of Chaos that are rumored to have attacked Holy Terra in the time of M2 in the first Xenos Wars, though their full nature as such was only appreciated when the first Everchosen made her appearance on Earth in that time. The technology was marked by bracelets upon the wrist and the Psybrids wielded unusual powers of magick of Warp-derived nature and of a very potent kind of devastation. It was them who incited the Osiris System to a revolt and did so under the behalf of a figure who presented herself as the Shadow-Queen. She raised a revolt large enough to draw three entire systems out of the loyalty to Terra that is the rightful nature of all mankind. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>In the time since the fall of humanity in the time of Old Night from the glories of the Age of Technology to the current Age of the Imperium, this first form of Chaos manifestation has appeared seldom. Here, and in the Pale Wasting when the forces that irrupted out from the Ghoul Stars harried the Imperium's fringes and struck deep toward its heart, it still reappears from time to time. If such creatures as this can reappear, the Imperium would be wise not to forget that Chaos never truly dies, nor do its manifestations shift away from what they were to what they can be again. The new Legion Master, Marius Gage, said that the Shadow-Queen spoke of a resurrection of the First Everchosen who would be presented with the skulls of the Thirteenth Legion to mark its triumph. The nature of this power does not match any of the known artes of the Warp, none of those told to those of us who have serve in higher ranks and higher spheres, nor those of other ranks and of other spheres. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Legion's triumph should not blind us that 40,000 Legionaries were slain by the reliance of a Xenos threat on the Old Chaos. This is further proof, however, of the merits of the Imperial Truth in that out of ignorance and the belief that they were merely facing powerful witches the remaining 80,000 Legionaries won a victory that even the Age of Technology's Men of Iron would have respected as worthy. </em>
</p><p>
  <strong>Ultramar: </strong>
</p><p>In the Age of Technology, Ultramar was one of the most powerful and self-governing realms of humanity. Named after the semi-legendary First Crusades of Old Earth and its Outre-mer, Ultramar was a realm of Five Hundred Worlds with a near-utopian life, marred only by the use of gladiator bloodsports reliant on the Cruciamen, the terror-engines known to later generations by their adaptation in the world of Nuceria and their blight upon the XII Legion. The Battle-Kings of Ultramar waged vicious wars against Xenos lifeforms, extirpating entire species in a pattern that was not considered especially noteworthy at the time. It is known that the later Saint of Molech was in Ultramar at points of the Age of Technology, as she is credited along with one of its first Battle-Kings in the defeat of a major Ork WAAAGGHH!!! with what are said to be a small detachment of forces of the Aeldari Imperium in its twilight years. </p><p>When the Cybernetic Revolt hit, Ultramar took a great blow, but not a mortal one, and it was one of the realms of humanity that endured most intact for the longest time into Old Night. It took 2,600 years for the old Ultramar regime to fully implode, a rate matched only by the collapse of the Old Imperium centered on Terra, whose last Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV, fell before a Warlord of Araby on the Plains of Blood. Yet fall Old Ultramar did, the realm degenerating into a set of minor alliances between several of the Five Hundred Worlds, and a remnant core realm of six worlds linked by Maccrage, the core-world. Maccrage itself was divided between the servants of Maccrage Civitas, a realm that evolved from a strong basis in the culture of the old Romanii as a deliberate product of the Age of Technology to something that became in all truth a Roman Republic of an Interstellar fashion...and the bitter and impoverished Illyrians, a culture that existed not just within Maccrage but on one of the six founding worlds as well. Maccrage was the kind of secular technological system welcomed by the Imperium as an ideal in the time of the Crusade. </p><p>To this world came the young Roboute Guilliman, adopted by his predecessor, the first great Battle-King since the time of Old Night, Konor Guilliman. It was Konor Guilliman who defeated and conquered Illyrium and re-established hegemony over the six core worlds in a very direct and centralized fashion. This permitted him to find access to the first of Ultramar's seven major warp-gates built within the system, the core of the old Ultramar's means of internal coherence. The Kingdom of the Seven Gates, as it was known, would undergo a very direct rebirth when Konor's younger brother Gallan Guilliman slew Konor in the Maccrage Forum and raised the flag of revolt against the monster-man that he declared the young Primarch represented, a 'thing of the sea of souls that has no place here.' Roboute Guilliman's victory in the Second Illyrian War was the start of the Reconquest of Ultramar, a set of wars that lasted twenty years and brought him to his five hundredth world, the planet later known as Nuceria, when his fleet encountered the<em> Imperator Somnium</em> and the Samothrace, the flagship of the War-Born. </p><p>Under Guilliman's stern eye the XIII Legion adapted the concept of chapters before most Legions, a pattern matched, ironically enough, by the XVII Legion, their great arch-nemesis. The XIII Legion would see service through the Crusade in a great variety of campaigns, one of the most notable that of Ullanor where along with the Khan it fought beside the future Arch-Traitor Horus in his last days of loyalty to the system. By a further irony, the XIII Legion found itself facing the kind of task usually given the old IV Legion in the time before it became the Praetorians of Terra, the inglorious and grinding slog against vast forces reliant on the weight of numbers and firepower. Experiencing this on this kind of scale gave Guilliman a far deeper idea of what he believed vexed his brother, though to the Lord of Iron's openly stated regret he did not accept this with grace when it was offered. </p><p>When the Heresy broke out, the Ultramarines were ordered to a Great Muster at Calth by the Warmaster Horus, but unknown to them were facing not one but two full-strength Legions, led by the Bearer of the Word and the Eater of Worlds. </p><p>
  <strong>Shadow Crusade and the Heresy: </strong>
</p><p>One of the more bitter and hidden campaigns of the Heresy along with the Thramas Crusade, the Shadow-Crusade pitted one of the largest Legions of the Crusade and Heresy era against a Legion larger than it was, though fully fallen to Chaos, and one smaller but lost over the course of the Crusade into the service of the Blood God. At the time of the Battle of Calth, the XIII Legion had only a partial idea, if any idea at all, of Chaos or the meanings of Chaos. The lessons learned in the wake of the Calth Atrocity and the long and bloody wars beneath the fallen fortress-world where bitterender leftovers of the XVII Legion waged squalid and terrible battles in the corridors in a world that approximated something of the old and debunked ideas of a Hollow Terra, were ones that sank in fully. When Calth fell, other worlds fell too. It is estimated that a quarter of the Five Hundred Worlds were burned in the course of this campaign, though only a few worlds faced the coming of the Primarchs of the XVII and XII Legions themselves. </p><p>The first of these was Armatura, the War-World, where the XIII Legion had erected a citadel it had boasted would be inviolate and nothing could possibly overthrow it. Within thirty-six hours of landfall the XVII and XII Legions reduced Armatura to the blackened hellscape it is now, where the most ferocious of the XIII Legion are encouraged to hone their skills. Another was Nuceria, the Twice-Destroyed World, where the Primarch of the XIII Legion, or so it is said, dueled his brothers, the other of whom also fell to the Blood God though he did not die here. A quarter of the Five Hundred Worlds burned and beyond this, there is much that is obscure and that has never been preserved. It is believed that there was a powerful Warp storm that divided Ultramar from the Imperium and that the Ultramarines, ever the most loyal of the XVIII Legions of the Crusade Era, spent the full weight of time pushing at the edge of the Ruinstorm without fail. </p><p>With them were drawn the IX Legion, fresh from the terrible battle on Signus Prime, and half the I Legion and its Primarch. Ultimately, after years of continuous and truly loyal efforts, the XIII Legion cracked open the Ruinstorm and were able to bring the IX Legion to Terra while the Primarch of the XIII Legion gathered the Crusader Host, a force equal to the weight of the Traitor Legions that had made their onslaught onto Terra and in the brutality and squalid nature of its Siege. Guilliman's March to Terra broke the Siege, and it was Guilliman, the Lion, and the Primarch Leman Russ who took some of the most active roles in the Scouring in the beginning, though the Lord of Iron eventually took his own roles when he fulfilled a pact with Guilliman. </p><p>
  <strong>Since the Heresy: </strong>
</p><p>By far the most numerous of the forces of the Adeptus Astartes are the Iron Warriors, who consist of a full five hundred thousand Legionaries divided into two successor Legions, the Sons of Iron, and the Legion of Living Lightning, each a hundred thousand strong, the Reserve Legion that has seen much of the firmest combat against the Q'Orl and ultimately orchestrated the Q'Orl Xenocide just as the Q'Orl finally succeeded in mastery of the Warp, and the core of the old Legion made up of its most veteran soldiers and personally commanded by the Warmaster himself. Among the second most numerous, however, are the Ultramarines and their successors, who are the most compliant with the chapter on the whole. Individual successors like the Novamarines, however, can and do differ. Among the few cases where the XIII Legion disregarded the will of its Primarch, however, are the endurance of the Tetrarchy, which has preserved much but not all of Ultramar's Heresy-era size. The Tetrarchy, as an example of Astartes rule of baseline humanity has drawn frowns from the High Lords of Terra. </p><p>The Lord of Iron has mediated the dispute, however, and the Emperor himself finally decreed following the Council of Kalkhedon, that the Tetrarchy is legitimate, even if the Anti-Khalkhedonians played their own part in the Nova Terra Rebellion. </p><p>The Ultramarines and their successors have done great service to the Imperium, none less than the Novamarines, whom the Lord of Iron in the wake of the fall of Roboute Guilliman and the bloody Maelstrom conflict, promoted to the status of a full-fledged Legion of their own. Of all the successor chapters, the Novamarines have done best against both the dreadful forces of the Ghoul Stars, which has been their self-appointed missions, against the aberrant Necron Xenos even by Necron standards known as the Flayed Ones, and their oversight of the great Imperial triumph against the Pale Wasting have all led to this honor, long mooted, forced through by the Warmaster. Of other successor chapters, the Scythes of the Emperor were the first to encounter the new  Xenos threat known as the Tyranids, against whom they waged the lengthy and bitter Sothan Wars, finally eradicating entire portions of Hive Fleet Kraken and convincing the Hive Fleet to find resources and nourishment elsewhere. It is the Tyranid invasion that has drawn together the successors of the Ultramarines, after the Maelstrom War. </p><p>It is likewise the Tyranid threat that has made the Schism of Ultramar that much more debilitating, as while the Tetrarchs and the Secessionists feud, the sheer rolling tide of Hive Fleet Kraken and its Swarmlord cannot be denied. Entire successor chapters of the Ultramarines, the Avenging Sons, the Aegiduii, and the Dolorii, have fallen to the HIVE fleet, and there are disturbing reports of new warrior-form Tyranids who display elements and factions akin to Astartes, save that their armor is organic, and their weapons likewise so. </p><p>In later years greater hordes of Tyranids have poured in, with Baal and its system seeing the regathering of the IX Legion, and only relieved by the return of its Primarch, the Lord Sanguinius destroying the Swarmlord in a bitterly fought battle and the sheer weight of his presence in the Warp disrupting the Hive fleet's control of its most powerful elements, seeing it scatter. With this, Ultramar has found some relief, but not nearly enough to counterweigh the effects of the schism. </p><p>
  <strong>The Codex Astartes and the Fragmentation of the Legions: </strong>
</p><p>In the aftermath of the Heresy, it was Roboute Guilliman who devised the system used by the bulk of chapters not affiliated with the Salamanders, Space Wolves, or the Iron Warriors. The Codex Astartes replaced the old Legions, vast cumbersome forces meant to function at the scale of 100,000/150,000 with smaller and leaner chapters of 1,000 that had far more firepower and were capable in their own way of destruction no less precise. The smaller size of forces involved meant, in theory, that the Chapters could wield better armor (in practice the Sons of Medusa and Olympia have the best armor of all Legions, and others have shunned such technology and rely on more destructive melee forces). All the same there was a bitter controversy over this, one that came near to touching off a new civil war among the Loyalists after the Scouring and the disappearance of the Lion. </p><p>Yet, in the end, by virtue of promising no breakup of the Iron Warriors and allowing them to flex their muscles in their preferred endeavors by rebuilding Ultramar to beauties attributed ten thousand years on to the Ultramarines from simple ignorance (in the view of most of the Imperium) and deliberate propaganda (in the somewhat less kind view of the Iron Warriors) to the Tetrarchy, Guilliman brought about the adherence of most Legions to the Codex. With each of the Fifty Foundings of Space Marines, the non-Iron Warriors Astartes have proliferated in scale and in the sheer diversity of their structures within elements of the Codex. Under the eyes of the Lord of Iron, who while not fond of the idea of the Codex nonetheless saw merit in it, it is not uncommon for chapters to have detachments of the Iron Warriors and their successor Legions, the Grand Battalions, serving with them as augmentation and auxiliaries, the better to form familiarity that the old IV Legion refused to cultivate and which its successors, the XXI and XXII Legions seek to do so on its behalf. </p><p>The Codex Astartes has done much to render rebellion against the Imperium, where it has reappeared among Astartes detachments, much smaller. The cases of the War of the False Primarch and the Badab War aside, in fact, all but impossible. It matches the Restructuring he did of elements of the Imperium's political structure, a pattern held to by his father with only some modifications when the Emperor returned from the Time of Seclusion during the War of the Beast. </p><p>
  <strong>Structure: </strong>
</p><p>Unlike the vast Legions of the Iron Warriors and successors, the Ultramarines and Codex-compliant chapters are designed for a much narrower and tighter form of combined-arms warfare. The armor of the Codex-chapter compliant tends to be somewhat stronger due to the smaller numbers able to draw on relatively greater resource pools. Codex-compliant chapters have far more organic integration of close-air support and artillery and have a more flexible approach to any given engagement. They also have a much broader use of the Libarium than is typical of Iron Warriors or their successors, permitting a holistic engagement. The standard Codex Chapter is divided at the smallest level with its Scouts, both its future and the reconnaissance elements of the Chapters. All Astartes begin as Scouts, even in the full-strength Legions. In the Codex-compliant Chapters, the Scouts are given training across every element of Astartes deployment across no less than twelve campaigns, and on the thirteenth are made full battle-brothers and assigned to the area where they flower the most in service. </p><p>From Scouts there are Tactical Marines, the bulk of infantry, who serve a role that in the eyes of a more conventional baseline human force blends heavy infantry and living armor support. Beyond Tactical Marines there are the more narrowly focused specialized arms that work with their fellow Marines. The Techmarines are the most ubiquitous and in the Ultramarines something of an insecure group, feeling a kind of competitive rivalry with the sons of Olympia and Medusa, who do not deign to recognize that there is a competition with the sons of Ultramar, only with each other. They fulfill roles of comms specialists and mechanics, as well as providing a specific linkage with Mars, as they are the liaisons of chapters (and Legions) with the Mechanicum. </p><p>The Librarius are both the Warp-specialists and Psykers, some of extreme potency, and the repository of the history of the old XIII Legion in its Terran and Ultramarian elements and of the Imperium as well. Only the Library of Lochos rivals that of Maccrage for its sheer depth, and Savants of the Imperium consider invitations to either to be the sum total of dreams in and of themselves, let alone the knowledge within them. Only the lost libraries of Prospero exceed them and it is to their ultimate detriment in a sense as both Olympia and Maccrage have seen regular raids by the Thousand Sons, who try to poach knowledge and have inadvertently contributed much to a knowledge of the effects of Chaos on Astartes physiology. </p><p>There are Chaplains in the Ultramarines, who in spite of the religious name seldom tend to be experts in or concerned with the Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Creed in any of its manifestations. They tend to fit into more of the concept of the political officer, focusing on maintaining discipline and if necessary executing Battle Brothers who have strayed far from the Imperium's light. As with Commissars in the Imperial Army, Ultramarines Chaplain have a disproportionate odd of death by Ork snipers. </p><p>Beyond this, the officer ranks extend up to Colonels and Chapter Masters, the Chapter Masters responsible for the oversight of each of the Ten Companies of a Codex-compliant chapter. </p><p>All Codex-Compliant chapters also have Raptors as the Astartes equivalent of paratroopers and Aeroplane-Assault Squads for close air support. Unlike the Air Forces and Orbital Forces of the Imperial Army and even Legion-strength troops, Codex-compliant chapters have far more organic air support, an element of no little resentment and rivalry among the various forces of Astartes. It is the close-air support and the organic artillery, which in itself is an innovation of the Codex unironically and unashamedly adapted by the Lord of Iron and admitted to be superior to the old system of the Principia Bellicosa used by the Crusade and Heresy-era Legions, that makes the Guilliman-structured forces so devastating on the field. To blend the enhanced strength and physique of Astartes with the power of air and artillery rounds that can be larger and more precisely aimed means a devastation that can only be believed if seen. </p><p>For all this, the Codex-compliant chapters have a great rivalry with the old-model Legions, and vice-versa, one cultivated by the Warmaster as partially a concession to his pride and that of his Legions, and partially a means to secure better performance from both. </p><p>
  <strong>Tetrarchs of Ultramar: </strong>
</p><p>The Tetrarchy, a system established by Roboute Guilliman after his becoming the Primarch of his Legion, endures to this day as the system most distinguishing Ultramar from other realms within the Imperium. While the Empire of Iron is a kind of broad federation owing loyalty and a manpower tithe to the Iron Warriors, its worlds are allowed a surprising amount of flexibility and freedom otherwise. The Tetrarchy, by contrast, has four rulers but otherwise is among the most top down and draconian centralized systems in the entire Imperium. Each Tetrarch within their sphere has more power per world and per inhabitant of that world than the Imperium does over the vast preponderance of its territory. The Tetrarchs meet in the Hall of Conclave on Magna Maccrage Civitas on a regular basis to decide affairs with and within Ultramar. Each in turn controls a quarter of the chapter's manpower and can and does call on successor chapters in the spheres of their Tetrarchate. </p><p>The Tetrarchs, in the Schism of Ultramar, are the core of loyalist sentiment to the Imperium, and the vast preponderance of successor chapters have chosen loyalty to the Imperium. The Silver Skulls, Auroras, Doom Eagles, Vindicators, and the renegade Ultramarines of Cato Sicarius, however, deem the fall of Roboute Guilliman to be a sign that the Imperium is doomed, that the Time of Ending is nigh, and that Ultramar must secede from the Imperium and go its own way. The Tetrarchs, for all that the High Lords of Terra worried about the precedent, have ever been among the greatest of loyalists to the Imperium, and to its vision of an uplifted humanity. </p><p>
  <strong>Marneus Calgar, Hero of the Imperium: </strong>
</p><p>Chapter Master of the Ultramarines since the death of his precessor, Marneus Calgar is in his three hundreth year of leading the Ultramarines, and in the Doomsday Protocol, all Ultramarines successors in a path that could let them revive the XIII Legion. Also the Tetrarch of Maccrage itself, he has presided over clashes with the Necrons in the bloody Damnos Crusade, with the Tyranid Hive Fleet Kraken in the Sothan Wars where he led the Ultrarmarines relief that prevented the extinction of the Scythes of the Emperor and is permitting them to rebuild their numbers, and a lengthy and bloody confrontation with the Imperial Fists warlord Sigismund, whose assault on Maccrage did much to earn him the enmity of the XIII Legion no less than the IV. Calgar was long a controversial figure, seen along with his fellow Tetrarchs as embodying a lesser version of the mindset that amplified by the corruption of Chaos led the Warmaster Horus to his doomed bid to overthrow his father and to the Horus Heresy. </p><p>In truth, Marneus Calgar was in the end the most loyal of the citizens of Ultramar and of their Astartes protectors and rulers, and it is due to his wisdom that Ultramar has seen a schism that has only seen a growing tension and smaller-scale armed strife but as yet no outbreak of war. Were civil war to flame in Ultramar, it is believed that the Tyranid Hive Fleet shall devour it and with it the eastern corner of the Imperium in the Ultima Segmentum would begin to implode. Calgar has also seen in the death of Primarch Guilliman a chance for the XIII Chapter and its successors to begin to break out of Guilliman's shadow and to meet the needs of their own day with their father's spirit of idealism and pragmatism, a quest that has seen him start to cautiously seek to mend elements of the tensions between the XIII Chapter and the IV Legion. </p><p>In Marneus Calgar, the Imperium has one of its greatest and wisest leaders, facing some of the stiffest crises imaginable, and the same irony as with the Iron Warriors. The Astartes, so divergent from humanity as to nearly qualify for a second species linked only by distant connections, have produced figures that truly are transhuman and posthuman in the noblest of senses. </p><p>
  <strong>Cato Sicarius, Self-Proclaimed Battle King of Ultramar: </strong>
</p><p>When the news came of the death of Roboute Guilliman and of the nature of that death, one among the leaders of Ultramar chose to reject it. Cato Sicarius, hero of many of the most bitterly fought battles of the XIII chapter and a long-term ally of the I Chapter and a few of its successor chapters, and of the IV Legion successor the Lords of the Living Lightning, decided that the only thing for Ultramar to do when its greatest son had fallen was to seek its own destiny independent of the broader Imperium. With five hundred lords at his side he and they swore the Oath of the Five Hundred on Espandor. In the aftermath of this ceremony, Cato Sicarius took old information from the Magna Maccrage library and went through the formal processes of coronation of a Battle-King, and he changed his armor from the old blue to the gilded artificier armor won by Battle Kings from the first Battle King of the Age of Technology, the long-dead and legendary Endymion I to Konor V, the last of the Battle-Kings and the last King of the House of Guilliman of old. </p><p>In declaring himself Battle-King Cato Sicarius has also begun a revival of very old UItramarian traditions that are far more parochial than the standard since the Age of the Imperium began, and it is this which has hit into a surprisingly wide-ranging amount of sentiment. Sicarius for all this still fights at the side of the Imperium against common threats, for a Battle-King who eschews battle is no king at all. A full third of Ultramar's worlds have sworn loyalty to Sicarius, and he has begun the painstaking work of recreating life on various of the worlds lost to the old Ruinstorm and its creation, the ones that were less devastated than Calth and Nuceria. These formerly blasted worlds are slowly beginning to know new life, and with them and with the growing numbers of colonists, the lives there are harsh enough to provide Sicarius with an ever-growing number of Astartes for the Battle-Kingdom's Maniples. Sicarius's actions have occurred mostly within the secretive environs of Ultramar itself, though all dread the prospect that the Warmaster, or worse the Emperor, should uncover what secrets lie therein. </p><p>
  <strong>Schism of Ultramar: </strong>
</p><p>It is the very reality of an active secessionist movement blatantly building an army, though not yet willing to expand beyond a set of minor skirmishes, that has made political life in Ultramar ever more fraught with peril. The Tetrarchy has increased the force of its control on loyalist worlds and those who serve the secessionists tend to be hanged on gallows in public for loyalist worlds to see. The schismers have already amassed near half-a-chapter of Legionaries from their first sets of colonists, whose harsh lives produce an excess of youth beyond what the worlds can support. The very grim Darwinian process whereby the Astartes taking their bloody toll of youth serves to keep these populations within resource means and increasing their loyalty to the Battle-King has created an element that the wisest of Ultramar see as guaranteed to turn into an Ultramarine Civil War fought between two of the old chapter's greatest champions, and worse, the prospect of an Imperial crackdown that would see the attempts to defuse the crisis peacefully as being no very great difference from the treason incited to begin with. </p><p>The schism has complicated all elements of Ultrarmarian political life, and none moreso than the war with Hive Fleet Kraken, whose onslaught was narrowly repelled at Sotha, and is still a factor in the strife in Maccrage. It is believed, in fact, that the Tyranid presence has been a great boon for UItramar, as the Hive fleet prevents the growing tensions and the second army rising in Ultramarian territory from declaring the onslaught of a civil war all dread is inevitable. </p><p>
  <strong>The Novamarines: </strong>
</p><p>Unlike other Ultramarines successor chapters, the Novamarines consider themselves detached in large part from the internal difficulties of Ultramar, just as their chapter founder Lucretius Corvo was detached from the Ultramarian politics of his day. Due to their task of overseeing the Ghoul Stars and their frontiers, the Novamarines have grown greatly, far moreso than their original homeworld of Honorum alone could support. Now numbering close to twenty-five thousand and split among twenty-five chapters with their new Legion Master overseeing their command, the Novamarines have also spent time waging war against some of the more fearsome threats of the Imperium. It was the bloody war against the Pale Wasting where for a decade they stood as the only Space Marines able to fight against the unknown extradimensional threat that manifested, that saw the quiet shift that allowed them to rebuild their Chapter strength and then augment it twenty-five times what it was. </p><p>As the Sentinels of the Ghoul Stars their system has come to resemble aspects of the old Ultramarines Legion, adapting elements of its particular combined-arms approach and hyper-rationality, and reviving the original meaning of the theoretical-practical construct on the one hand....and married to an extension of the tattoo-reliant culture of Honorum and a much deeper adaptation of spirituality than any chapter outside the White Scars among the loyalist Legions. It is that dichotomy, the ultra-rational and the deep mystic patterns that verge into elements of a controlled Stormseer-like use of the Warp, that make them such deadly effective foes, as they are able to wield the best of two radically divergent kinds of approaches, and have had the tremendous luck not to impale themselves on the extremes of either. </p><p>It was this combination that permitted the Novamarines to find and destroy the Age of Technology relic, the corrupted Abominable Intelligence once known as the <em>Spirit of Eternity.</em> That so powerful a ship from the Lost Age fell to a successor chapter steeped in the war-sciences of the Imperium was a lesson not lost then or later, and its doing so after it neatly suborned an entire force of Skitarii and a Magos of the Mechanicus and unleashed major havoc on Mars itself meant that the Novamarines ended up benefiting far more from the aid of Mars than they'd had any reason to expect in exchange for keeping the scale of the havoc quiet, which they did. It was also this same combination that let them defeat a major assault by the Chaos lord Typhon on Ultramar and to work with the Grey Knights to drive back a second appearance of the Daemon Primarch Mortarion. Both forces took heavy losses, and it was only by virtue of the combined power of the most powerful Grey Knights and Epistolaries of the Novamarines that Khaldor Draigo, not yet exiled to the Warp, was able to defeat the Primarch Mortarion, though rumors that he carved the name of the fallen Grand Master of the Grey Knights on the Primarch's heart are greatly exaggerated. </p><p>What was done in truth was impressive enough, Khaldor Draigo speaking the Daemon Primarch's true name and compelling him to remember himself as the Emperor made him, and then as what he had become under the corruption of the fell Plague-Lord. It is said that the truth of the incident with the heart was that the Daemon Primarch went mad and tried to tear out his own heart to destroy himself and that the God Nurgle made a rare partial appearance in the Materium to prevent his servant from self-destruction. </p><p>
  <strong>Silver Skulls: </strong>
</p><p>The first of two Iron Warriors successors who were 'adopted' by the Ultramarines Legion, the Silver Skulls and Scythes of the Emperor share a common and controversial root. It is said that in the wake of the Heresy and the rebuilding of Ultramar that the Primarch Peturabo discovered a Grand Battalion of his sons under Idriss Krendl, thought lost and destroyed in the wake of the Battle of Phall, had been split between four worlds and the equivalent of two somewhat-larger proto-Codex chapters. The first of these, the Silver Skulls, under their founder Alexius Comnenus, adapted a lighter shade of silver on what was otherwise Iron Warriors armor marked only by a dark blue Ultima. Too, of all the supposed Ultramarines chapters, their organization is blatantly in line with the Iron Warriors, down to having bards who recount history in written and oral forms, Stor-Beszakh formations that are organic in the Iron Warriors fashion of being able to switch between colossal amounts of firepower or more flexible over open sights missions, and a predisposition for siege campaigns, where they are the major experts among the Legion, and for architecture. </p><p>Their recruiting world is a paradise, architecturally, and the harvest of souls taken into the Legion is held to be the price for living in such a paradise in Ultramar. </p><p>Unlike the Scythes, the other Iron Warriors successor, the Silver Skulls came to believe that Cato Sicarius's view of a secession of Ultramar was valid, and they are his most loyal adherents, as well as the mainstay of his most belligerent adherents. Their vision is the one that is the most extreme in terms of secession, aiming not for the Five Hundred Worlds but the entirety of the Ultima Segmentum, the largest-spanning portion of the Imperium, as a new kind of Empire of Silver instead of the Empire of Iron. It is rumored that the Silver Skulls have ties to the Traitor Iron Warriors of Warsmith Andraaz the Ever-Living, though nothing of this has been confirmed bar a single sighting of the infamous gene-smith Honsou in Silver Skulls space. </p><p>
  <strong>Scythes of the Emperor: </strong>
</p><p>Of all the Chapters of the XIII Legion, the Scythes of the Emperor, like the Silver Skulls, have the most controversial origins. Perturabo accused Guilliman in a long-forgotten controversy after encountering the proto-Scythes and Silver Skulls of poaching his sons and suborning their loyalty, and the goodwill earned by rebuilding Ultramar led to the flashpoint between the Legions that laid the later tensions Marneus Calgar is working so patiently and hard to undo. The Scythes wear dark armor with hazard stripes on their right pauldrons and their helm mirrors that of the Iron Warriors Warsmith Krendl, whose detachments were assumed lost after the Battle of the Phall System. An equal controversy is that the Equerry always wears a yellow helm matching that of the legendary loyalist Imperial Fist Alexius Pollux, whose role in sustaining Ultramar's assault on the Ruinstorm and in defeating an assault by renegade Night Lords on the UItramarian world of Sotha, later the Scythes' homeworld, marked one of the greatest and most obscure traces of the small contingent of loyalist members of the Traitor Legions. </p><p>Warmaster Perturabo, who respected Pollux as one of the few warriors of that Legion he considered worth anything as a rival to his own, had little to say on this, but much moreso to say when his discovery of Iron Warriors gene-stock hypno-transferred into loyalty to Maccrage and to something called Imperium Secundus, a heresy held by outlying fringes of Ultramar, produced the Sothan Strife. Given the Iron Warriors gene-seed connections, the Silver Skulls and Scythes of the Emperor have an unusual history of connection to both Legions, and have become something akin to loyalist version of Blackshields, serving either the Tetrarchy or the Warmaster, depending on who secures their fealty first for any given mission. Yet the Silver Skulls, in spite of embracing the secessionist ideas of Cato Sicarius, have not been joined by the Scythes in this. Too much blood was shed in the Sothan Wars with Hive Fleet Kraken for the Scythes to consider separatism, and of the various skirmishes that have bordered on civil war, the one that came closest to all out war was over the ruins of twice-destroyed Nuceria when a company of Silver Skulls and a company of Scythes got into a sparring match that became first a brawl and then a straight up battle won, narrowly, by the Silver Skulls. </p><p>Of all the successors loyal to the Tetrarchy, the Scythes are the most loyal, and this loyalty has seen them at last adapt new colorations on their armor that increase their homages to their Iron Warriors ancestry. Too, they have begun to adapt Olympian as a second battle-argot, to ensure no infiltration by Silver Skulls or secessionists. </p><p>
  <strong>Nemesis: </strong>
</p><p>In the days of the old XIII Legion the Nemesis Chapter, led by Eleson Iasus, was the product of a contemporary effort for reform. Nemesis long retained the core of the old Terran XIII, and had the smallest influence from Maccragan recruits. This in spite of it being the Destroyer Chapter, and the effects of Destroyer Weapons on Astartes physiology. Why Ultramarines recruits, as with the Death Guard, displayed greater longevity and resilience to these weapons is unknown and what studies, if any, were made during the Heresy have since been lost. Established as a successor chapter in the Second Founding of Space Marines, under Iasus, the Nemesis are the most Codex-defiant of the Ultrarmarines successor chapters, befitting the 22nd Chapter's distinctive traits during the Crusade and the Heresy. At 5,000 Legionaries they are five times the size of a standard chapter, and have a combat philosophy somewhere between that of the Iron Hands and adapting elements, or so it is said, of the old Lunar Wolves methodology with the idea of an overpowering destructive force wielded against the center of enemy power. </p><p>Where they differ from the old pre-fall XVI Legion is that the Nemesis Chapter does not seek drop pod approaches, but makes far greater use of firepower and orbital approaches, as they are the experts, without equal, of Ultramarines successor chapters in this method. Indeed, it is the very means of reliance on vast amounts of firepower and self-reliance in making it and maintaining it that accounts at least in part for the larger size of the Nemesis Chapter, as it has taken far fewer casualties than most Astartes Chapters, and has a surprising record of the longest streaks of bloodless compliances. To a degree, it is speculated as with White Scars successor chapters like the Chagataids, that the Nemesis Marines cultivate their bloody reputation to ensure that their mere presence means that worlds will surrender without much of any resistance. </p><p>As a further paradox, this has led to two of those worlds rebelling in the idea that the Nemesis Marines had a reputation based on bluff. The aftermath of the reprisal campaigns have seen no further such revolts and underscored that there are no bluffs involved. The Nemesis Marines rely most heavily on rad-weapons, including matter-antimatter nuclear weapons, and the wide varieties of horrific atomic weapons constructed in Old Night and the time during and since the Great Crusade to the present. They also wield phosphex, and other deadly weapons  to a point that they have, together with the green color of their armor, been nicknamed among the Astartes chapters 'Guilliman's Salamanders', a name that they proudly wield with an unironic fashion. The Nemesis Marines have been the major chapter to exempt themselves from a role in the Schism of Ultramar, believing their weapons too destructive to permit any but the most bloody of solutions, and in this case this is no solution at all. </p><p>They have spent time serving with the Raven Guard and with the Iron Warriors against both Xenos and Chaos cults, and equally controversially sided with the Xenos warlord Orrikan against a group of Drukhari Eldar who sought to build a realspace Imperium out of some unexplained desperation. </p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>